Allow retroactive creation of path aliases in drupal 8-9 which incorrectly believes contant had manually set aliases but are blank

**** drupal 8 incorrectly thinks manually set no alias

Basically, the bug seems to be that “Automatic URL alias” was unchecked for every node created, when in fact there was no automatic alias configured which is the only reason it didn’t get an automatic alias— and indeed, it got no alias at all. Trying to rectify this after the fact doesn’t work because of this weird behavior or bug.

Could this possibly be from Drupal fixing the opposite problem?

From the blog post Common Drupal Problems - Solutions Included:

My custom URL alias keeps being overridden! If you have the Pathauto module installed, it might be overriding your custom URL. To fix this, uncheck “Automatic URL Alias” under the URL alias fieldset – this will allow you to use your custom URL in conjunction with the Pathauto module. Also, there is a patch that apparently fixes this issue - though we have yet to test this.