Yes, you are right. That instruction is wrong. It was supposed to be simply bit $80 and test the acculumator. Somehow, the assembler didn’t flag this. It still works because it is effectively a NOP as you mentioned, and the lda PLAYER_HP_H on line 281 already sets the negative flag appropriately. Good catch! That line can be removed. I’ll fix it along with an upcoming feature update.
The version of xa that I have is 2.4.0 and it was installed from the standard Ubuntu 24.04 repository. This change looks like it was introduced in 2.4.1 and Ubuntu hasn’t updated yet.