You have found another edge case
Solved: Text for no results in user directory
Unsolved: Misleading text for no results in user directory when ‘enable user directory’ disabled
I still wonder when the new default text is visible. I thought it was for new sites before the jobs ran the first time, but bootstrap mode adds users immediately, so I would expect that even the first user wouldn’t see an empty directory. At least that’s how I understood:
FIX: Create directory items for new users when in bootstrap mode (#27… · discourse/discourse@e3ae57e · GitHub
The users directory is updated on a daily cadence. However, when a site is new and doesn’t have many users, it can be confusing that a user who has just joined doesn’t show up in the users until a day after they join. To eliminate this confusion, this commit triggers a refresh for the users directory as soon as as a user joins, if the site is in bootstrap mode. The reason for the conditional trigger is that refreshing the users directory is an expensive operation and doing it often on a large site with many users could lead to performance problems.