The incoming solar energy remained greater than the energy Earth was radiating. The question was simply where was the excess going if it was not showing up as surface heating.
The Earth contains many complex systems that are exchanging energy with each other in complex ways. Many of these have periodic or approximately periodic cycles than can change the magnitude of energy flow between them, or even the direction.
So sometimes you'll have periods where an increase in total energy ends up not changing surface temperatures, instead warming something else like part of the ocean, or maybe a particular layer of the atmosphere, or maybe going into melting glaciers (converting a mass of water from ice at 0 C to liquid at 0 C takes a lot of energy), or some combination of all of those and more.
As noted in the post: 1998 was super hot and it was around there from about ~2000-2010. Data from 2010-2020 shows it was just part of a noisy--but still upward--trend.
There's no clear upward trend if you zoom the focus to just the period from about 2002-2012, the trend is drowned out by noise in that window. 8 years ago that would have been the previous decade, which is likely the source of the "pause" discourse you remember from 8 years ago.
Hmm... but if I zoom into 1980 to say 1995 I see a similar noisy set of data points and no obvious upward trend. But no one ever said there was a pause then.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metoffi...
Now, it looks like it hasn’t? So basically what we though the average temperature each year was wrong and this new data is right?