I noticed that when updating a category or payee name, the entities themselves receive updated names in delta requests, but transactions are not updated (even though last knowledge increases). Inquired with the YNAB API team and they stated this is correct:

"According to our developers, when a category or payee name changes, our change detection system does not attribute this change to transactions that point to these entities but instead to the category and/or payee entity. Your noted work-around would probably be the best way to handle this."

The eluded to workaround is just finding a way to source category/payee name from their respective tables rather than relying on the transaction properties from the transactions table.