WooCommerce 5.8 Downloadable Product cannot grant access

Prior to V5.3, I could manually add files to customer accounts. This ability is important for several reasons – customer needs updated files, customer gift, customer wants their files from the old site in one place etc.

Now it is impossible! This message appears with every attempt, “Could not grant access – the user may already have permission for this file or billing email is not set. Ensure the billing email is set, and the order has been saved.”

This needs to revert to how it was. I am not the only person suffering because of this change. My site is essentially useless if I need to go back to manually emailing files to my customers. A workaround is not a solution.