yum-cron ignores "exclude" setting when update_cmd = default

[numericOverflow]

I want yum-cron to install all updates (security or otherwise) but only exclude a couple critical packages. When running with the following config file, the gh and neo4j packages were still updated, despite being listed in the "exclude" setting. I even tried exact match and wildcard (*) to force it to exclude, but that didn't help.

/etc/yum/yum-cron.conf

[commands]
update_cmd = default

#Exclude updating these packages:
# add additional package filters with a space between each
exclude = neo4j* cypher-shell* gh gh*

I'm running on RHEL

NAME="Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server"
VERSION="7.9 (Maipo)"
ID="rhel"
ID_LIKE="fedora"
VARIANT="Server"
VARIANT_ID="server"
VERSION_ID="7.9"

[j-mracek]

I found a following link - https://serverfault.com/questions/567195/how-can-i-exclude-a-package-from-yum-cron-but-not-from-manual-yum-upgrade