Better guesses reduce the number of guesses, so there will be less branch misprediction, but there will still be mispredictions for each remaining branch. So I would guess branchless interpolation search would still help.

In practice because the real code in scikit-learn is used in parallel, memory bandwidth starts being a problem in real usage. Plus, in the overall algorithm (this is just a small part) the time spent on binary search is now low enough that there are other, more significant bottlenecks elsewhere. So in practice the branchless optimization had enough impact on the original motivating code base that there didn't seem much point spending more time on it.