what does this last statement mean? it is as though the query runs just like without any hints.
oracle doc:
Using Parallel Execution
Examples of Distributed Transaction Parallelization
This section contains several examples of distributed transaction processing.
Example 1 Distributed Transaction Parallelization
In this example, the DML statement queries a remote object:
INSERT /* APPEND PARALLEL (t3,2) */ INTO t3 SELECT * FROM t4@dblink;
The query operation is executed serially without notification because it references a remote object.