How can I get rid of an unhelpful parallel branch when unpivoting a single row?
I am able to get the desired plan shape with a serial loop join when all of the following are true:


An APPLY or CROSS JOIN is used instead of UNPIVOT
The APPLY contains no outer references
The source of rows in the APPLY is a table value constructor as opposed to a table


For example, here is one way to do it:

SELECT A, B
FROM 
(
    SELECT A
    , MAX(
        CASE
            WHEN A = 'VAL1' THEN VAL1 
            WHEN A = 'VAL2' THEN VAL2
            WHEN A = 'VAL3' THEN VAL3
            WHEN A = 'VAL4' THEN VAL4
            WHEN A = 'VAL5' THEN VAL5
            WHEN A = 'VAL6' THEN VAL6
            WHEN A = 'VAL7' THEN VAL7
            WHEN A = 'VAL16' THEN VAL16
            ELSE NULL
        END
    ) B
    FROM (
         SELECT 
           MAX(CASE WHEN ID = 1 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) VAL1
         , MAX(CASE WHEN ID = 2 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) VAL2
         , MAX(CASE WHEN ID = 3 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) VAL3
         , MAX(CASE WHEN ID = 4 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) VAL4
         , MAX(CASE WHEN ID = 5 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) VAL5
         , MAX(CASE WHEN ID = 6 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) VAL6
         , MAX(CASE WHEN ID = 7 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) VAL7
         , MAX(CASE WHEN ID = 16 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) VAL16
         FROM dbo.PARALLEL_ZONE_REPRO
    ) q
    CROSS APPLY (
        VALUES ('VAL1'), ('VAL2'), ('VAL3'), ('VAL4'),
        ('VAL5'), ('VAL6'), ('VAL7'), ('VAL16') 
    ) ca (A)
    GROUP BY A
) q
WHERE q.B IS NOT NULL
OPTION (MAXDOP 4);


I get the desired plan plan shape as claimed with just one parallel branch:



I tried many other things that did not work. This answer is unsatisfactory in that I don't know why it works and it may not work in a future version of SQL Server, but it did solve my problem.