They only seem to work if you submit jobs from an open Max file, not if you use the Browse option. I’m not sure if this is intentional or not but it’s frustrating having to choose between having the sanity checks or waiting for a scene to load. Later on in a project this can easily take 10, 15 minutes.
I do not know if this was the case in recent versions, because the Browse to submit feature was not working correctly with Scene Manager for quite some time before 2.2.10. But I’m pretty sure that sanity checks used to run with all submission modes.