Thanks for the clarification, @Alan_G.
Let’s say I’m building a Liquid extension that needs to display customer information. If the cookies are cleared on the storefront, my extension won’t be able to access customer-related data (even with liquid objects) because the _shopify_essential cookie is missing. As a result, my extension prompts the user to log in.
However, when the user navigates to the account section to log in, they’ll see that they’re already logged in (since the customer account context is still active). The only workaround at the moment is for the user to manually log out and log back in, which resets the _shopify_essential cookie and allows the extension to detect the logged-in state and datas properly.
It would be expected that visiting the customer account domain would reset the _shopify_essential without having to log out then log in again so that there is no mismatch between the two authentification layers which are tightly related.
Hope this helps understand the problem!