Thank you all. Another user affected by this issue reached out to the support team and was told the following:
“Our engineering team has reached back out to me regarding your instance, and they confirmed to me that it is of natural behaviour in Asana for the rules within a project template to be paused when applied to a task being converted to a project.
We appreciate you taking the time to bring this matter to our attention and how it can be a bother. We completely agree with this and are already working to build out a change in this. You can expect to see this added functionality where the rules won’t pause in the coming in the near future.”