Maybe that’s it. My dad’s current phone does run an old Android version, so that might be why local backup restore worked. The WhatsApp version was up to date though. I can confirm local backups work on Android 8 and Android 11.

So did I, about 2 weeks ago, for my dad. It worked. It’s unlikely that anything changed in a week

They do, but they don’t explicitly allow restoring from local backups directly within the app anymore. However, if you manually move the backups to a new phone or whatever and then fresh install WhatsApp on that phone, you will be prompted to restore messages from the local backup that’s present.

I don’t try to mess with their cloud backup scheme, I import the local backups manually instead. Their cloud backup is so slow and their chat transfer feature is so buggy.

I use Nova Launcher because I’m used to it and there’s really nothing that still can replace it. There are plenty of similar launchers, but none that’s as feature rich as Nova. People love to hate it because it has been acquired by an analytics company, but I have data disabled for Nova Launcher, so it can’t really do anything. Even on other older phones that don’t have the option to disable data for Nova Launcher, it hasn’t sent a single KB of data in months. I don’t think it’s a problem.