So I backed up my database just in case I wanted to do some more testing then went ahead and ran another backup WITHOUT doing a repair first, but WITH the --no-backend-verification=true parameter added.
As expected, the backup ran just fine - though it did complain (warnings, not errors) about not being able to delete files that were already deleted.
Removing the --no-backend-verification parameter puts me back in the “Found n files that are missing from the remote storage” failure scenario.
Guess I’m off to do a database repair. 