Was told there was an update. The launcher took forever to load the patch (lots of initializing time), and then when I tried to start it, I got a message in a pop-up window “An updated version of World of Warcraft is available. Please launch the Battle.net app to download the update.”
I had to restart the launcher to get it to re-load, fortunately that was a much smaller patch.
And now it’s working. Yay. But it would be nice if the launcher could re-detect there is a patch, if a new one comes in while downloading the old one.