It is a bit more complicated. Remains of nitric acid are still present,
but it does have much with redox potential of liquid vs. redox potential required to dissolve the gold back to the solution.
Nitric acid undergo decomposition in acidic chloride enviroment, producing mainly nitrosyl chloride and chlorine. Chlorine is very quick, reacting immediately with anything around, but also undergo slow decomposition to oxygen and hydrochloric acid (but this is minor and slow reaction). It also evaporates from reaction, mainly while still hot - removing "oxidizing force" of the juice. And alongside with NOCl, giving the AR fumes the unmistakeable "yellow" hue.
Nitrosyl chloride isn´t that powerful oxidant, and undergo quick degradation to nitrogen dioxide in AR solutions.
Also with strong solution of AR, dissolution of gold isn´t particulary quick reaction.
When there are remains of "weak" AR, or better said some "oxidizing species", gold will be dissolved anyway, but VERY SLOWLY. So it buy you time to let it settle and filter the gold in usual fashion and only minor losses.
So, overall
if you keep the AR hot for long periods of time, most of active oxidizers, capable of dissolving gold (mainly chlorine) will simply evaporate or dissociate into compounds, which are very mild oxidizers in terms of dissolving gold. It does not say that they cannot dissolve the precipitated gold, but it is a very slow reaction.
I personally experienced this to happen, when I just didn´t de-nox the AR solution afterwards. Gold drop appeared to be as normal as usual. Gold dropped, started to settle. Then I came back in the morning, and all gold was redissolved so I decided to push it with more sodium sulfite. Again, gold dropped, I came next morning, and some precipitate was clearly on the bottom of the beaker, but stannous told gold presence in solution (after TWO subsequent drops). Third drop accomplished the thing, but it can illustrate how fine and long-settling are the reactions of residual nitric in AR.
Similar thing happen when you denox with urea.
Urea is incapable of reacting with nitric acid in a way it will be destroyed. It just form a salt. But nitric undergo decomposition in chloride enviroment as I discussed above. So the formed N(III) species like NOCl or nitrous acid finally react with urea, creating nitrogen and carbon dioxide. But also, this reaction is only driven by decomposition of nitric acid. Taking into account, that for nitric in presence of urea, it is needed to break free from the urea.HNO3 salt, settling the equilibrium takes even more time.
So it is fairly common to encounter the situation, when
you take hot AR gold solution from heat, and directly treat it with urea. It will hiss with two or three spoonfuls, but then stop. That does not mean that you neutralized ALL nitric, but instead that you killed all N(III) species lurking around in the juice. There could be plenty of undecomposed nitric acid, which could be still present after "sucessfull" de-noxing with urea.
That is why we always advise to use sulfamic acid, because sulfamic acid is capable of destroying not only N(III) compounds into nitrogen, but also nitric acid to nitrous oxide. But it need to be hot to work on nitric itself.
So, dilution will help you to mitigate the re-dissolution of dropped gold, but it isn´t bulletproof and all reliable way how to do it. But if you master this way, good for you
I wouldn´t do it this way, but it could certainly work in your favor.