Arabic kept coming back to an app it was removed from
RTL and Arabic resources kept reappearing in an internal tool because the first removal was a hidden i18n toggle with the resource bundle still loaded.
Two copies drifted
One idea kept by hand in two places — schema and migration, dev and prod, app and app.
Super-admin is an internal developer tool where Arabic is redundant, and RTL support had been explicitly removed once already. It was silently back.
The first removal had evidently been a hidden toggle with the resources still loaded, which is an invitation for a later pass to re-wire it. Fixed properly this time: i18n/config.ts hardcoded to English with no language detector and the ar resource not loaded at all, and the translation file physically moved out of the app's source tree into /code-archive/ with a re-wire README, so nobody finds an ar.ts sitting next to en.ts and helpfully reconnects it.
If it shows up again, check whether a dependency bump reintroduced i18next-browser-languagedetector or similar auto-detection.
The general shape: a thing removed by disabling it will come back. Removing the artifact — while keeping it recoverable — is what makes the decision stick.