I’m not aware of a recent change that would have changed this behavior. I was under the impression it always worked like this (displaying an error if the user cannot be found). This is the code that checks if it can read the username from the api credentials
And the user below will be nil because it doesn’t exist, which will raise the error message above on line 131.
A recent change was made 23 days ago, but it doesn’t apply to your situation and returns a different error message anyways.
Just to double check, I configured my local discourse to use this commit from over a year ago and I get the same error when using a non-existent user.
One good thing that comes from this is that we have api scopes now, so if the users only need read access, you can update that api key so that it is no longer an all access key.