Glad you figured it out.
You are very specific with this, so I have to ask an unrelated question if I may?
When you are doing this, have you noticed or found a way around a popular track getting replaced by the same song on another album after you replaced an album? This drives me nuts and I have not found a way around this except re-adding the entire artist all over again which fixes it.
Nuts is right, It drives me CRAzzzzY and in short no. Its also one of the reasons that twice a year I fully plex dance my entire music library to ensure popular tracks and the track that is reported within the dashboard history is accurate.
I’ll also add, years ago I worked out this process [HowTo] Configure Popular Tracks Section to Prioritise Albums over every other release type! which to most would seem bonkers but for the most part it works for me and I still use it today.
Its all based on naming release types (albums, eps, single, live , compilation etc… ) and then I use folder timestamps to prioritise the albums I want to scan first ensuring some live track does not get scanned first ahead of the album forcing it onto the popular list.
That’s very interesting. Thanks for the link. It’s a pretty bonkers workaround, yes, but we Plex users do what we need to do 
