ZWave-JS and MQTT Ignoring commands

I have a script that runs daily to re-interview devices that seem to go into comas at random. This worked flawlessly for months. Now I see ZWaveJS acknowledges the command but then seems to cheerfully ignore it. Acknowledgment below appears in debug window:

899 INFO MQTT: Message received on zwave/_CLIENTS/ZWAVE_GATEWAY-zwavejs2mqtt/api/refreshInfo/set: ‘{ “args”: [ 79 ] }’

Has something changed?

Why?
It really sounds like a mesh problem, add a smart plug or repeater between the device and a routing node.

I add that when I manually re-interview the devices, they come back to life just fine. It’s just the MQTT command that is ignored.