Loading a zone without A entries

I's like to load a zone which has a NS specified by no A. It's going to be used for dynammic updates (basic zone has to exist before the updates are done). This used to work with bind version 9.3.4, but after migrating to 9.7.3, I get for example:

zone localhost/IN: NS 'localhost' has no address records (A or AAAA)
zone localhost/IN: not loaded due to errors.

Since the zone is going to be updated later on, I don't care about the missing entries. Is there some way to turn off this check and bring back the previous behaviour?

The example zone I'm testing is:

$ORIGIN .
$TTL 86400
localhost IN SOA localhost. root.localhost. (
16 ;
28800 ;
7200 ;
604800 ;
86400 ;
)
    NS localhost.
$ORIGIN localhost.

I know I can easily add the A record, but since those files are autogenerated in my case, I'd like to avoid it.