@ajolo2ky I understand why you might expect it to work that way, indeed this is something that has niggled at me for some time. The reason it hasn’t worked that way in the past is due to the complexities of supporting auto-publish across both Gutenberg and Classic editors. Many folks still use the Classic editor.
I looked at a possible improvement to the Gutenberg behaviour this morning and am hoping to get an update in the next version. In the meantime just uncheck “Publish to Discourse” or disable Auto Publish if you don’t want posts to be published in that scenario.
I’ll update you here if/when the next version is released with the updated behaviour. Hopefully in about a week from now.