Unattended upgrades stuck

I have a VM running Ubuntu 20.04. I noticed that unattended upgrades were stuck due to the error:

Could not figure out development release: Distribution data outdated. Please check for an update for distro-info-data. See /usr/share/doc/distro-info-data/README.Debian for details.

The problem was solved by running

apt-get install --only-upgrade distro-info-data

The /usr/share/doc/distro-info-data/README.Debian reads:

Outdated Data Errors
====================

If you get an error that the package data is out of date, look for a newer
distro-info-data package in your distribution's updates.

So my question is what is the purpose of the unattended-upgrades package if these need to be manually over watched for such errors? (or am I missing something). Does someone need to manually look after this package's state?