Magento2.3 – Programmatically setting order status to On Hold getting stuck

I have an observer in my module the fires when the order is placed, depending on a condition I use

$order->setState(MagentoSalesModelOrder::STATE_HOLDED, true)->save();
$order->setStatus(MagentoSalesModelOrder::STATE_HOLDED, true)->save();

To set the order status to “on hold”, this works but when I try to take the order off hold from the admin it says “the order was not on hold” even though the status is on hold in both sales_order and sales_order_grid

I have also tried with object manager which does the exact same thing (also, the comment is added so it seems like its right):

$orderId = $orderIncrementId;
        $objectManager = MagentoFrameworkAppObjectManager::getInstance();
        $order = $objectManager->create('MagentoSalesModelOrder')->load($order_id);
        $currentStatus = $order->getState();
        $status = 'holded';
        $comment = 'Age verification failed';
        $isNotified = false;
        $order->setState($status);
        $order->setStatus($status);
        $order->addStatusToHistory($order->getStatus(), $comment);
        $order->save(); 

And I have tried through the order repository (but this didn’t work as it’s in the observer sales_order_save_after but still says “order id does not exist)

$holdStatus= MagentoSalesModelOrder::STATE_HOLDED;

$id = $orderIncrementId;
        try{
            $order = $this->orderRepository->get($id);
            $order->setStatus($holdStatus)->setState($holdSatus);
            $this->orderRepository->save($order);           
        } catch (NoSuchEntityException $ex) {
            alert("not worked");
        }

Currently, I’m manually changing the order status to processing in the database to get the orders off hold but as we up-scale the module this won’t be practical – does anyone have any idea about this before I create a button that manually changes the status in sales_order and sales_order_grid with direct SQL?