One problem with using status to know where you are is that all you know is you’ve gotten as far as the status seen, but not as far as the next one, and some aren’t specifically seen because of other displays which fill the status bar – one can see phase at About → System info, e.g. for Backup_ProcessingFiles.
Stuck on “Waiting for upload to finish” gave an example of finding phases at the finishing end of backup.
One can sometimes also study log messages (which can be set quite high) to try to figure out locations. Ruling out auto-cleanup, though, may be as easy as your saying it is or is not in your Advanced options.
You would have to ask a C# developer, which I’m not, but sometimes I can follow Duplicati code around. There is unfortunately a huge need for Duplicati developers, as well as for people to help with anything.