When I start course discovery all the users from lms are moved to the discovery admin panel, but their superuser and is_staff status is removed. Why is that and is it the supposed behavior?
This might be related to a discussion open in tutor-discovery.
Users are not actually moved. Discovery, LMS and CMS have their own admin panels. As tutor-discovery enables SSO to the LMS, when you create a new user in Discovery it will be linked to the user in the LMS. However, there is no way (AFAIK) to transport the staff and superuser status from the LMS to Discovery via SSO.
The only way to overcome this is to create a discovery admin user following the regular instructions and using it to grant permissions to the SSO users.