The bank would notice. Almost any bank is going to notice a large deposit on a daily report. They may not report it, but if you have to many they’ll flag you for monitoring. One large deposit a year under 10k may not result in much more than that. Six large deposits of $8K over as many weeks will be flagged. They can also aggregate deposits made over a timeframe if they believe you’re trying to structure your deposits. At that point they’ll investigate to determine if a Suspicious Activity Report is warranted.

The effectiveness of this monitoring is going to vary wildly by sophistication of the institution. Any national brand will have automated systems doing all of this using a huge list of suspicious activity to look for. A smaller local shop may be more manual with limited analysis, but you would be more likely to stand out since they have a smaller customer base.

Note: not really disagreeing with you just expanding on the notion that you’re safe under the reporting limit.