Something like this happens to me all the time, on multiple discourse sites (not just Meta). It’s a bit like the experience with Gmail, where you can delete a message (or take some other action) and it’s not reflected in the UI until you reload, sometimes reload multiple times. I ascribe it to hitting a different load-balanced server every time from a pool which synchronizes only “lazily”. Yes, super annoying but it seems it’s how we should expect sites to “work” now 
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Ian