We already have precedence for this behavior in other flags in refresh, so it seems reasonable to follow along instead of inventing new semantics.
For example, --devmode is sticky and will remain in place if an automatic refresh is performed. But once we issue a manual refresh command, we force the flag to be used again or it will go away. It makes sense as the behavior is non-standard and clearly asks for a behavior which isn’t the recommended result for such a refresh.