So just confirming, the order was:
reaction with discourse_reactions_enabled_reactions " – this is the step I am unclear on. Did he just remove the reaction on the post? Did he remove it from discourse_reactions_enabled_reactions ? Or did he add it to discourse_reactions_excluded_from_like?I removed it from the discourse_reactions_enabled_reactions site setting.
Yes, changing discourse_reactions_enabled_reactions does not affect history (it never has), only adding/removing reactions from the discourse_reactions_excluded_from_like changes history.
Well it kinda (visibly at least) did here, as the reaction is showing up both as and as 
, which is confusing to see.
Oh okay I see where you are coming from now – usually when you’ve reacted and it’s also counted as a like, we only show the reaction on the post. Now you’ve disabled that reaction, it’s showing both. Will see what I can do for this 
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
I enabled the like sync for all new sites last week and I am beginning the rollout for existing sites on our hosting now, starting from our Basic plan and working upwards to our Enterprise customers.
For cases where there are tens of thousands of new records that will be created, we may reach out to individual site owners before toggling this setting.