The workaround works!
And I agree with @erlend_sh that it should just be adopted as a best practice. However, admins/staff should be warned about the “unlisting” notification gotcha. It should be documented somewhere…
BTW, apart from meta and the docs at discourse/docs at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub, is there a Best Practices Guide for the different Discourse personas? (Admin, Moderator, Casual User, Email User, etc.)