Trying to“Follow" a site in SharePoint silently fails when user lacks OneDrive license on tenant

Target SharePoint environment

SharePoint Online

What SharePoint development model, framework, SDK or API is this about?

SharePoint REST API

Developer environment

None

What browser(s) / client(s) have you tested

• 💥 Internet Explorer
• 💥 Microsoft Edge
• 💥 Google Chrome
• 💥 FireFox
• 💥 Safari
• mobile (iOS/iPadOS)
• mobile (Android)
• not applicable
• other (enter in the "Additional environment details" area below)

Additional environment details

We are a multi-tenant organisation, the bug is present when the user is connecting (via cross-tenant synchronization) to SharePoint Online on a different tenant (but still within our organisation).

Describe the bug / error

We are a multi-tenant organisation. Users have full licenses on their national tenants, but when they visit our "global" SharePoint (authenticated via cross-tenant synchronization), most users have no specific licensing on that tenant.

If they click on the "Follow" button at the top right of a SharePoint site home page, the UI updates to suggest the action was successful, but if you refresh the page - the status of the button resets back to "Not following", and nothing has been set.

The "Follow" button is linked to this API end point:

https://_domain_.sharepoint.com/sites/_sitename_/_api/v2.1/favorites/followedSites/oneDrive.add

... which fails with a response including:

"error": {
"@odata.type": "#oneDrive.error",
"code": "generalException",
"message": "General exception while processing"
}

Steps to reproduce

1. Access a SharePoint site with an account that has no specific licensing
2. Click the "Not following" button in the page header, and observe that it changes to "Following"
3. Refresh the page, and note that the button has reset back to "Not following"
4. In the network trace, look for calls to "_api/v2.1/favorites/followedSites/oneDrive.add", and note that an error is returned.

Expected behavior

The expected behavior is that all users should be able to "follow" a SharePoint site, regardless of licensing. This is especially an issue in multi-tenant organisations, where a fully licensed user (on their home tenant) may access SharePoint sites on a different tenant (but still within the same organisation) via cross-tenant synchronization. I note that "Save for later" (found in the footer of sub-pages) does work without any specific licensing.