If you certify a key (locally or exportably) you are not asked if you want to publish.
If you revoke a local or exportable certification you are asked if you want to publish (on keyserver, but wording should change with T6663).
A sensible process would be to ask the question on certifying exportably and on revoking an exportable certification.
And never ask when working with local certifications.
If I revoke a certificcation I am asked to "publish revocation".
When certifying there is the checkbox to publish.
The only thing where we do not do it automatically or ask is when fully revoking the complete certificate. Which I find somewhat sensible because a user might not realize what revocation meant.
But in general we decided that most of the publish options should be configurable by the administrator to automatically be published. But I don't think we have a ticket for that yet, that was one of these things we drew on a whiteboard and forgot about it. And I don't really think it makes too much sense because it too easily propagates user errors. Well maybe for expiry updates. I'll open a new ticket and link that here.
My issue was that it makes no sense to publish a revocation of a local certification...
I'm fine with it in the case if the certification was exportable.