Hi Todd Thompson,
Sorry for not updating this sooner.
When we initially applied this z-value when publishing, the issue did not persist. Strangely enough, after a few days the issue came up again. I since opened a ticket with Esri (Case #02383984 ) and is sounds as though this has been logged as a bug previously (BUG-000122481).
The analyst provided me two workarounds, one being the above workflow that I mentioned (which doesn't work, and we debunked) and the second was to publish from ArcMap (instead of ArcGIS Pro).
We tested publishing from ArcMap and have not seen any issues thus far. Would this be a suitable workaround for you and your organization?
Unfortunately for our organization this workaround requires us to re-publish data that has already been published by past versions of ArcGIS Pro (since ArcMap cannot overwrite this data) consequentially resulting in duplicate publications. Please escalate the bug if you also are running into this issue.
Best,
Amanda