Thank you. Sorry for the slow response. I was out of town and without the Mac that had the problem.
“Ask to keep changes when closing documents” was turned off; I turned it on. Based on a sample size of one, that solved my problem.
I’m sure I got the dirty bit before Numbers and Pages 14.4, and I haven’t (yet) updated macOS on this fairly new computer (MBA M3), so it seems that Numbers or Pages changed that setting. I don’t approve of macOS updates changing settings; I sure don’t approve of application updates changing macOS settings.
macOS has worked this way for me with Numbers and Pages for as long as I can remember, so I don’t think it’s a change in those apps. Perhaps a macOS update bizarrely flipped that setting off, and though that’s never happened to me, I never have that option turned on. As I said, I don’t want that behavior.
I think one of the recent updates did flip that setting. In my case, it was in the opposite direction. I prefer having any changes automatically saved, but after a recent update, I began getting the prompt to save the document when I was closing it.
I assumed that Apple had capitulated and returned to the old document model. It didn’t occur to me that it was another instance of recent updates messing with users’ settings.
I would have thought that was it, but if it didn’t happen to you, then it gets weird. Of course I didn’t keep notes on the prior behavior, but I firmly believe that the prior behavior changed when I installed Numbers 14.4.
We’ll probably never know what happened or why, and I thank you for pointing me to the solution to my problem—especially since it’s the behavior that you don’t want.