This is going to get interesting. If you are troubleshooting a bug, you might consider conversing with one of your senior developers at this point. Round 2 means you worked through problem one time. You've tried (and done great!). However, the others on your team are a critical resource and you should take advantage of their knowledge but only once you have the perspective.
How can products be saved?
Mass save review
In order to use mass save on your local environment, you need to determine the correct consumer:
bin/magento queue:consumer:list
If you are NOT using RabbitMQ, you can look in the queue message table to find messages.
bin/magento queue:consumer:start product_action_attribute.update
This starts the queue consumer so bulk messages will now be processed.
Importing products
Build a small CSV file and import it. Does this change the value?
It's time to replicate from a "random" source
bin/magento project1:bug1:initialize