Strange Auto-Publishing Behavior in a Homesite

I have a client who is having the strangest behavior on their homesite. If they go to add a news article - whether from the News web part or from the + New drop-down menu, once the news post page is provisioned, it is automatically publishing. The link to the blank page appears in their web part and the news post they are editing does not have a Publish button on it. The same thing is happening when you create a normal site page also. 

To try to work around this, they created a new page and selected the checkbox for Save as a personal draft first. Once they finished adding their content, there was no button to publish it in any way. Then they used the Managed Access option on the individual page to attempt to make it viewable in the News web part. It does appear in the news web part on their homepage BUT it is only a gray box with the page title at the top that is linked to the article. I have checked to be sure the page is a "Promoted page" - and it is. 

I have never seen this in any tenant before and cannot replicate it in any of the 3 other tenants I have access to. As of right now, we are only aware of it happening on the intranet home page which is a homesite and a hub site. It worked as expected until this week as far as we can tell. Is anyone else having this issue? Has Microsoft pushed out an update that broke homesites or News web parts on homesites?