I believe I was thinking of these discussions, where unless I misinterpreted something it was said that a separate professional account is permitted only if it is necessary as part of an official role:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/are-two-accounts-allowed-for-the-same-person/27028/
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/two-accounts-for-the-same-user/35150
I brought this up because reading your post it struck me as potentially confusing that creating multiple accounts for the purposes of troubleshooting would be OK…
…while people have been told that other instances of creating accounts for distinct purposes (e.g. IDing one’s speciality vs. observing other taxa) are not OK – even if the motivation for doing so is explicitly not to “sockpuppet” in the sense of “evade suspension, circumvent restrictions in functionality, or other forms of bad behavior, like confirming your own identifications”, but merely to keep different roles or activities separate.
Edit: I fully understand why having multiple accounts is not ideal even if one has the best of intentions (e.g., it is too easy to make mistakes like not noticing which account one has logged in with) and if it were generally condoned it would probably be challenging to monitor such accounts to determine that no abuse is happening. So my understanding has been that iNat has been pretty strict about the policy that multiple accounts are only allowed in exceptional circumstances.
Troubleshooting is obviously not a nefarious purpose, but neither are some of the other situations where people have wanted to create a second account and have been told they should not. So it feels a bit contradictory to what has been communicated more generally about having multiple accounts.