PayPal Payment Processing Suddenly Not Working

The problem is that the config.local.php is never being updated by the upgrade process, since it contains data that never should be changed automatically, like database settings, etc.

So please add these lines of the code in that file after these ones:

// Storage backend for sessions. Available backends: database, redis
$config['session_backend'] = 'database';
$config['session_redis_server'] = 'localhost';
$config['cache_apc_global_ttl'] = 0;
$config['cache_xcache_global_ttl'] = 0;

OK I will do as you say. Thank you.
What seems odd is that this has not caused a problem until now. Version 4.9.1 was released in October of 2018–about six and a half years ago. Weird.