It sounds like they really are adamant that this is a 'bug' but I am a retired software eng in the industry for two decades on enterprise level and anytime a label verbiage stated 'disabled' etc it was indeed disabled, otherwise there would be some sort of error code or something.
The frontend code shows "Feature disabled" when it gets any error from the backend, no matter what the error actually is. Combination of sloppy frontend code, and some issue on the backend with verification.