CreateApprovalRecords: Approval record was not created correctly for user

[tahnalos]

I'm getting this error when trying to diagnose a missing approval issue:

Does anyone know what this error means and how this could have happened?

[ViktoriaMikoova]

I know this is an older thread but this just now happened to us and the issue was something completely different, so maybe this will help someone in the future too 

For us the issue was a newly created data policy on the sysapproval_approver table which made the state read only based on incorrect logic. So if it's not a BR, ACL, numbering running out, you should also check data policies on the approval tables