Genuinely you don’t need to not save because you have to save to bake and you can always just unbake the nodes.
I can say this alone may not cause the issue you’re experiencing but it is adding an unnatural workflow which could complicate things unnecessarily.
It might be worth using incremental save (+) icon near save before you bake, then bake and compare the outputs. You will have two clean projects then independent of the state of one another.
Also technical bug report would be essential to fix. The Devs can’t fix anything not sent to them so be sure to do this