Things did go south. It was sketchy and did not work.
I just ran a Discourse site update and couldn’t get past the clean up migration you’re talking about.
This migration is crashing out. discourse/plugins/discourse-cakeday/db/migrate/20251127125226_delete_old_default_values.rb at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub
When the migration runs migration_timestamp("20250717093505") and migration_timestamp("20250811132217") from the up method you get nil values. Those nil values break the sql query in the delete_settings method of the migration.