Turning off purchase sharing and my family can’t access WhatsApp

Now that my family are older and have their own payment cards I found the family sharing to be restrictive because not all of my family are old enough to have their own payment card. Part of the issue with this is because I still want the family to share iCloud+ storage so they all must stay in the family settings.

So I decided that I will turn off purchase sharing and make it more inconvenient to pay for things for the younger kids in my family.

The issue I’m having with turning off purchase sharing is that now my wife can’t access apps like WhatsApp, it says that she is not the person that purchased the App even-though it’s free !

At this stage my wife doesn’t want to lose all the important group chats that are school, work & kids clubs related so I had to turn purchase sharing back on just in case it all got lost by deleting the app and downloading it again from her own phone with her own Apple ID.

What do we know about the behaviour of apps backed up to the cloud in this scenario ?

Will the App successfully restore once purchase sharing is turned off and it no longer recognises her Apple ID as the owner of the App ?

I find this pretty strange for a free App and it’s not the only one, she is locked out of several Apps that are free.