What you describe about auto destroy to me sounds like it’s doing it’s meant to do.
The pickup marked destroyed will self-destroy on save load…
Btw, If you ever fall into necessity of using multiple load functions, for whatever reason, make sure you use a node to check for “Thread Safety” of the save system.
I have seem devs using async load, and use a second load node, and a third one, while the load process of the first one is still running (as a background task).
Pretty crazy stuff some people are doing.