Maybe it was started by dbus activation of the connman service. In that case, the flag corresponding to disable-vpn? won't be passed since we manually pass it to the shepherd service only.
It could be that then it tries to start up vpn but that dies because of the unknown symbol and then the connmand also dies maybe? When then started up by the shepherd service later (when you manually invoke herd start networking) it will get the flag just fine and start up just fine without vpn. In short, it could be a timing issue. If you invoke connmanctl without having connmand running already then dbus activation would actually invoke it automatically (without flag), if there's a service file for "net.connman". But the error message from your other computer suggests that there is no such service file, so it shouldn't have.
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