I'm going to leave this matter up for the community to decide.
Whether or not the tag shows up in the list of popular tags makes little difference was the users will be informed that they cannot use the tag. Feeble attempts to circumvent the restriction by tagging it with some completely unrelated tag will be met with closure (and deletion) by the collective user community. It that doesn't tell the user we don't want these types of question here, not much else will.
If you stopped to take a look at the types of users that attempt to post identification question you'll observe that very few, if any have the Informed badge. By inference you can assume that they did not take the time to take the tour and get to know the site a bit better before position. Instead they see venue for asking about their long-lost nostalgic memories of what they assume to be anime/manga, ignoring the attempts we've made to deter them.
I am one to argue that this ignorance won't be resolved with the deletion of the remaining id request. These oblivious new users will still come straddling in to our site asking for identifications question, because all they see is a website about questions and answers, they assume it's like the web forums they frequent, and post what they want without much care for our format, nettiquette, or articulation.
Regardless of whether or not these users are registered or not as soon as we admonish them, by closing their question, the likelihood that they return or make an attempt to understand us drops significantly. These users just give up and leave. Few make an attempt to gather the prerequisite 20 rep to ask these off-topic in chat.
So what can we do about these greedy and selfish new users? I leave that up to the community. The bulk of the matter has been more or less addressed by the feature request. What's left is a little clean up or maintenance. These request already are becoming less frequent, so given time you might only see them show up once in a blue moon. I personally would wait to see if it will die out naturally... what about you?