I'm not sure I understand the concern. The user had to take explicit action to enable command logging in their .csirc, something like the following:
(gnu-history-install-file-manager
(string-append
(or (getenv "HOME") ".") "/.csi.history"))))
Presumably if they did the research to find this and created or edited the .csirc accordingly they *want* to keep a log of the commands they've entered into csi. I don't see any value of forcing the additional step of touching the file. I'm not aware of any Unix shells or tools with command logging that require manually touching the history file before logging starts working.
For a solution, how about a version "gnu-history-install-file-manager-paranoid" that has the behavior you like or if that is not acceptable how about a version "gnu-history-install-file-manager-lazy" that does the create automatically?
I've set up several people with readline in csirc and get WTF responses when it doesn't work out of the box and I have to remember the strange requirement of touching the file.