Sharing in case this helps anyone else that sees “Updating” in the admin panel although no update is actually in progress and the forum appears otherwise healthy.
While it never impacted docker manager updates, the past few versions I’ve had to do CLI updates as the admin panel always seemed to indicate discourse was updating.
My forum is small, no custom plugins.
The resolution to clear the issue was to flush the redis cache.
While I cannot share the underlying cause, it was super frustrating to hit a limit of my knowledge and understanding of the discourse update process (this is not a complaint, its an admission).
To this point, rebuild app had always been the reliable fix for pretty much any issue.