I just stood up a new instance of Discourse, imported and restored to a backup of my production instance via the web Admin panel. At that point, all of my data shows up and the forum looks as it should, BUT I get stuck in the log in look explained earlier.
I tried the rails command quoted above, with the following return:
[1] pry(main)> User.update_all(auth_token: nil)
=> 1884
After that, I attempt to log in to the forum via web again, and again get the log in loop. It successfully authenticates, but never acts as If i am logged in.