I've actually seen this happen quite a few times. It's challenging to reproduce, but I bet it can be done; all it requires is an update to text rendering that would require stories to be recomposed. (Also to recreate my own experience of this, I'd need to repeatedly uninstall and reinstall obsolete versions of InDesign.)
I found it because I had a client who insisted 1) that all text frames be snapped to content, and 2) that I always update to the latest version of InDesign as soon as it was available. Now, I was unenthusiastic regarding instruction number two, but he was convinced that immediate update of all software tools was always advisable. (He was a computer security wonk, a paranoid Red Team stereotype.) So I was working on alternate format statements that included a bunch of SE Asian complex script lanugages - Khmer, Burmese, Lao, and Thai. The frames containing these stories were of course snapped to content as per client spec. Then an update came out - I couldn't tell you if it was 13.0 to 13.1 or 13.1 to 13.2, but I dutifully upgraded, finished my document, and exported a PDF without thought.
All of the text frames for the SE Asian languages overflowed, and I didn't get a warning from the PDF export tool, just as ZeroLJ describes. In troubleshooting the issue, I found that the way to fix the overset text was actually to Recompose All Stories. There isn't a menu item for it, so far as I know, but it can be found in the Text & Tables section of the Keyboard Shortcuts, with a default shortcut of Control + Alt + /. Whacking that shortcut caused the overset text to reappear.
ZeroLJ, you said in your second post that
My only suspicion is the InDesign did an auto-update between version 7 of my amends and the final artwork version, and this version altered the text boxes slightly (we are talking fractions here— I literally touched the text boxes in question, and the text re-appeared), BUT even if it did shrink the text box, it still didn't flag the 'over-set text' issue up at PDF stage.
I personally don't think it shrank the text boxes; my gut feeling is that it adjusted the leading, paragraph spacing, something along those lines. Periodically, we get warnings with new releases of InDesign that text might reflow; this is an example of that reflow. The fact that just "literally touching" the text boxes inclines me to believe that some action to recompose the stories is really what is called for.
I suppose you could check my hunch by figuring out when you applied the 18.5 update, and seeing if it was after your last edits to your version 7 but before you exported your final artwork. Like you, I was relying on the PDF export tool to inform me of overset text. I don't do that anymore; now I have a variety of preflight profiles, and I always look at it before export. I also always whack Control + Alt + / on every single document I touch that was not produced in the exact dot version of InDesign that I happen to be using. It only rarely causes visible reflow, but every time I see it visibly having an effect on what I'm working on - one doc out of twenty? fifty? no idea, it's unusual but not rare to see - I breathe a sigh of relief, and remember how bad Pagemaker was. I don't know if you were ever a Ragemaker user, but I had to use the hidden "diagnostic recompose" constantly to get around layout issues like this one.
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