I saw this refresh-required issue recur on my site (Discourse hosted) on Wednesday 2017-03-08 (during client demo ugh) but it was resolved the next day. I don’t think it was resolved by any update and havent been able to reproduce. Appears to be working for me now.
Related feature request 
Edit: Sorry this was the actual bug related to Group button (not topic list) but perhaps related:
Selecting the Leave Group button on Groups page doesn’t toggle to immediately show the Join Group button.
Also appears to be resolved now.