If your friend had followed Configure an S3 compatible object storage provider for uploads you’d not see enable_s3_uploads. It’s unclear whether setting those in the database rather than ENV is part of the problem.
That’s not the same as Enable direct S3 uploads . That’s “Enable direct S3 uploads”
You also need to change Max image size KB and Max attachment size KB
But I changed my max upload to 100MB and tried to uplaod a 37MB file and got the “file is too big” error, so you may be right that there is a bug. I’ve not updated the site where I tested in a while.