Not the case. A charger will pulse at zero volts in order to sense the current. A totally depleted battery looks like a dead short. For an open circuit, that pulse will draw no current. That makes the charger assume there is no battery connected.
See my post 24. Some chargers will NOT charge a battery exhibiting very low voltage. I’ve not rigorously tested that on the 2 car chargers I mentioned, but, on the one the threshold seems to be 5 volts or so. The charger “thinks” the battery is a short, and stays off. Hook the low battery to a good strong battery through a “light” jumper cable (built in resistance to limit the current a bit) for a moment, remove that connection and hook the charger back up, and now the charger charges the low battery.
(Of course, severe depletion is also not good for car batteries, and severe depletion and a little time left that way is really deadly to them...)
Sure, go ahead and argue with me over whether the battery charger I used to try to charge a completely dead battery worked or not.
Hint: It didn’t.
I ended up having to use a variable bench power supply to get enough charge into the battery so that the battery charger would detect it and start charging the battery.