diff --git a/.ci/run-revdep-checks.sh b/.ci/run-revdep-checks.sh
index b889b3e54c3f..b5d9d880d5a7 100755
--- a/.ci/run-revdep-checks.sh
+++ b/.ci/run-revdep-checks.sh
@@ -8,8 +8,11 @@ mkdir -p "${CHECKS_OUTPUT_DIR}"
 # preferring precompiled binaries where available.
 #
 # This is done for speed... tools::check_packages_in_dir() only performs source
-# installs of all packages, which results in lots of compilation. {lightgbm} checks
-# do not need to care about that... as of this writing, nothing has {lightgbm} as a
+# installs of all packages, which results in lots of compilation.
+#
+# ref: https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/594b842678e932088b16ec0cd3c39714a141eed9/src/library/tools/R/checktools.R#L295
+#
+# {lightgbm} checks do not need to care about that... as of this writing, nothing has {lightgbm} as a
 # 'LinkingTo' dependency or otherwise needs {lightgbm} at build time.
 Rscript ./.ci/download-r-revdeps.R "${CHECKS_OUTPUT_DIR}"
 
diff --git a/.github/workflows/r_revdepchecks.yml b/.github/workflows/r_revdepchecks.yml
index 9e98f4745bce..18d2d48c4938 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/r_revdepchecks.yml
+++ b/.github/workflows/r_revdepchecks.yml
@@ -72,13 +72,6 @@ jobs:
         run: |
           Rscript -e "install.packages(c('R6', 'data.table', 'jsonlite', 'knitr', 'markdown', 'Matrix', 'RhpcBLASctl'), repos = 'https://cran.r-project.org', Ncpus = parallel::detectCores(), type = 'binary')"
           sh ./build-cran-package.sh
-      - name: pre-install binary packages
-        # pre-install all of the dependencies... tools::check_packages_in_dir()
-        # is hard-coded to compile them all from source, which takes a long time
-        # (https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/594b842678e932088b16ec0cd3c39714a141eed9/src/library/tools/R/checktools.R#L295)
-        run: |
-          Rscript -e "install.packages('crandep', repos='https://cran.r-project.org', Ncpus = parallel::detectCores())"
-          Rscript ./.ci/download-r-revdeps.R
       - name: run revdepchecks
         run: |
           bash ./.ci/run-revdep-checks.sh