Product attributes being modified and not taking affect due to having already been modified at a different scope

We have a client who’s store is running on Magento 2.4.3 currently and a really frustrating issue keeps occurring.

Basically, they are making regular changes to their products and these changes are not taking effect on the website. After some investigating, we discovered that various attributes have been modified at the website store scope overriding the default setting.

This is happening for a lot of products, all different attributes randomly.

The latest instance just today was that customers were actually checking out of the website with products priced at £0. It turns out that these products were disabled at default scope but were enabled at website scope. I found 50 products like this that would have been visible in frontend for free!

Now our client is absolutely insisting that none of them switch the scope when working in the backend – goodness knows how many of their products are in a mess in their catalog because of this (consists of approx 15k products).

So my question really is, has anyone ever come across something similar to this or know of anything in the system at all anywhere that might affect a product’s attribute at a more granular scope than the default?

I can see that affected products are all recently modified and our client states yes, that was them but are saying that they are absolutely not switching scope at all so I’m really a bit stumped on where to go with this… 😅