The symptom In browser-mode maintenance (Playwright, no SSH), plugins marked as "excluded from update checks" were still being updated. After the run, a "plugin updates remaining" WARNING email arrived every time. The excluded plugins were intentionally left behind, but the residual check treated them as unfinished updates and fired a warning — a two-part problem: wrong behavior and a misleading alert. SSH path vs. Playwright path On SSH-capable sites, WP-CLI's --skip-plu...