Hmm, I never saw this anomaly in my P3P.
The good ole days......I do remember around the end of 2015 there was version 1.5 firmware that allowed many drones fall from the sky, due to battery getting too low on full acceleration. When DJI LiPo batteries get below 3.0V they shut off, to protect themselves from damage. Hah! Forget the drone, we're protecting the battery. This mostly happened in cold weather, and when the drone was launched with a "less than full" charge. That was fixed with 1.6 firmware. The solution was to invoke auto dethrottling after the voltage got down to 3.6V. When one of the cells reached 3.6, you no longer had full throttle, it was restricted to keep the voltage above 3.0V until the end of the flight. Version 1.6 is the firmware I stuck with until I sold the craft about 9mos ago.
I would have certainly noticed this issue the OP mentions because I would hover at 6' all the time when landing, sometimes a full minute before I would walk over and hand catch, which is how I landed 90% of the time. It's really odd that some craft have this anomaly and others don't.
@3rdof5 , have you tried to reset the drone using DJI Assistant? If you're looking to experiment, that's what I'd try next. I'm wondering if DJI may have gotten a bad batch of barometers that cause this anomaly.
I also never used auto land because the descent was too fast.