OK, I think there is definitely a bug here now. I found the forum posts which told me to use “certificates_revamp.use_allowlist”, it was apparently this one (no idea why that wasn’t showing up on Discuss search hits before, but it does now). Because I was also having the experience that if I didn’t have that, certificates would disappear. Now that I’ve removed it, I am once again back to certs disappearing…and it actually broke all the manually-issued certs in some classes :’( (I think they only break if someone goes and manually requests the cert…but it might also be if someone else completes the class. I’m not sure.)
so tl;dr: with “certificates_revamp.use_allowlist”, certs can’t be issued. Without it, they break post-issuance.
cc @crice who apparently made the suggestion to add “certificates_revamp.use_allowlist” in that thread.