It'd be much more useful if you post an MRE showing this behavior in order for people to help. Even if there is a genuine bug, you (or someone else) would have to report the bug to the maintainers which should hopefully contain an MRE showing this behavior; so it's a win-win.
as expected it was user error somewhere. i could not reproduce with the minimum test case... and now using either methods described above it works as expected. git dissected the hell out of it and still cannot reproduce what we were seeing that day.