This problem occurs when using the config-sync plugin which communicates a different id to strapi.
e.g. in dev the API Uploads directory has the id 1, which is persisted in the config’s json file. But in staging it is id 26, which is why it creates a new one, because an api uploads folder with id 1 cannot be found.
We ignored the api upload folder configuration for now:
excludedConfig: ["core-store.plugin_upload_api-folder"],