Why does Animator component prevent the player from facing left?

Question

I'm making a 2D platformer with Unity. A few days ago, I was testing the game; the player could face right and left based on its moving direction and animations were playing correctly. I exited playmode because I had to assign the player position into a slot in inspector for the checkpoints. After assigning that, I entered the playmode again and surprisingly, I encountered a strange problem. The animations were working but the player was not able to face left when it was moving to the left side. I still have this problem. This is very strange to me because I didn't change anything neither from the code nor the inspector. So I believe this is a random Unity bug. After testing the game many times, I found out these:

1. If I disable Animator component, the player can flip again but obviously the animations won't play.
2. I can have both Animator and flipping working at the same time only when I check or uncheck root motion in playmode. But when I exit, the problem returns. So the previous unchecked or checked root motion will not work in the next playtest, so I can just check or uncheck it while the game is playing; otherwise it won't work.

These are the reasons why I think the Animator component prevents the player from flipping but I have no idea why this is happening because this component has nothing to do with the facing code. Thanks in advance.

This is the code I use for flipping the protagonist:

bool isFacingLeft;

void Update()
    {
        //Move the player.
        //Target velocity is defined in another script and is not important in this context.
        targetVelocity = new Vector2(Input.GetAxis("Horizontal") * maxSpeed, 0);
       
       //Flip the player's localScale.x if the move speed is greater than .01 or less than -.01.
       if (isFacingLeft == true)
       {
          transform.localScale = new Vector2(Mathf.Abs(transform.localScale.x) * -1, transform.localScale.y);
       }
       else
       {
          transform.localScale = new Vector2(Mathf.Abs(transform.localScale.x), transform.localScale.y);
       }

       if (targetVelocity != Vector2.zero)
          isFacingLeft = targetVelocity.x < 0 ? true : false;
    }

Answer 1

Usually when something like this happens it's because the keyframe animation is overriding the changes that you're trying to make in code. In this case, that could mean that the animation has keyframes for scale that are overriding the changes you apply to the scale in your code. The first thing you should do is look for and delete any scale keyframes in the animation.