The screenshot doesn’t show any version change to signal - the version number is the same, so I was just answering why you might see an update like that since I thought that was part of your question.

Those might be flatpak “refreshes”, which show up as “updating to the same version”. As described by a flatpak maintainer, sometimes an app or runtime gets updated without changing the user-facing version number. I assume that’s what you’re seeing here.

Did you make sure to stop network manager too? I think disabling it tells it not to start it automatically but I think if it was already running it may have stayed up and maybe it brought the interface back up.

That’s my only guess, if ip link shows it as down still then idk. NetworkManager also has its own Mac spoofing thing so you might have better success editing the properties of the network connection in NetworkManager and putting a new Mac in the cloned Mac address field. I’ve only used macchanger with netctl.