Incidentally, and absolutely weirdly, I just retried it … and the upload worked nicely.
Which startles me as much as anybody else. I did not change anything, not even text, in the interim. So my best guess is some strange, unexpected server-side issue or delay in settings or whatever.
So probably solved/unrelated: unknown other issue at core. Sorry for the false alarm, but it looked like the plugin was responsible as other parts worked.