Announcement 
I would like to announce that we are going to start rolling out the discourse_reactions_like_sync_enabled setting to all of our hosted sites, setting it to true, and setting it to default true for new sites.
What this means is that historical reactions will have a Like record created for them. On some sites that haven’t used reactions this may be a very small amount, on other sites this may be to the tune of tens of thousands of records.
This will influence the Top and Hot pages on your forum, and will likely result in more Badges being issued, because there are many of them based on Likes.
If you do not want reactions counted as likes, both new ones and historical ones, you must add them to the discourse_reactions_excluded_from_like site setting. By default only 
is excluded.
I am confident in our changes, but please feel free to report any issues here as we go through this rollout.
I was finally able to merge a fix for this issue today at FIX: Reactions doubled up as like if no longer enabled by martin-brennan · Pull Request #289 · discourse/discourse-reactions · GitHub