The WordPress maintenance tool shows a badge on each site card when there are pending plugin updates. Under normal operation, when maintenance completes successfully, the badge clears until the next dashboard scan picks up fresh data. That's correct behavior.
But a report came in: when maintenance ends with a warning or an SSH error partway through, the badge disappears even if plugins were left unupdated. "If the update didn't finish, I need to know — but the badge is telling me there's nothing left to do."
Why the badge was disappearing
Tracing the bug, the root cause was in the frontend badge-update logic, which was built on a hard-coded assumption: maintenance complete = all plugins updated = zero remaining.
When the frontend received a maintenance-complete event, it deleted the site's entry from the badge cache (_updatesDashState). "The run is done, so the count must be zero." That assumption.
