As said, when looting enemies that have gold now, the money is automatically taken. If the mob only dropped gold, the loot window doesn’t even open. If the mob dropped anything else, the loot window will open, but with the spot at the top where the money drop would be, empty. To be clear, the auto loot setting is OFF, and has always been off.
The weird thing is this started happening in the middle of a play session. I did not change a single setting, didn’t change, add, or remove a single addon. The only unusual thing that happened during this playsession is I got about 16k gold from a lucky auction, and spent 14k gold finally buying Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth, which I mounted and interacted with the NPCs on. When I did try to log out and back in, the weird issue persisted.
The only result I could find of this happening to anyone else was this thread from a year and a half ago: Game auto looting gold - #7 by Señorcoconut-ghostlands
I want to be clear, to the sort of people who were complaining that the person in the linked thread posted their issue, I’m not complaining that this is happening, this would be great quality of life if I wanted it, the problem is the game is doing something I didn’t tell it to do, and is acting in a way that it has never acted in the 20 years I’ve played it (granted I didn’t play retail after BfA). So please, don’t leave unhelpful replies.