As per the following page, the new workflow editor changes are not saved immediately in inactive workflows and need to be saved using the Update workflow option:

Edit and publish instantly

A key difference with the new editor is that it doesn’t use draft workflows.

In the old editor, changes were made across multiple pages and stored in a draft until you were ready to publish. In the new editor, admins only ever edit the published workflow. Changes are now all made in the same view and can be published by selecting Update workflow, or discarded.

A big benefit of this is that the new editor doesn’t have the same limitations around active workflows as the old editor.

This means:

• you can delete statuses in active workflows, and

• if a status has no outgoing transitions (not including global transitions), new outgoing transitions can be added (regular or global).

You no longer need to copy the workflow, make changes, and then update the workflow schemes to activate it. It’s all one editing experience.

It would be great to have the ability to auto-save the changes being made to inactive workflows that are edited in the new workflow editor, just like the old workflow editor. This will help users avoid losing changes when they accidentally close the browser tab or temporarily switch to the old workflow editor.