Gilo,
Before making that logical leap I would need to see a wireshark trace to review the packets coming back from the server. That was a very odd edge case that we were never able to figure out what that plain text message use was for nor why it was sent when only DHE cipher suites were used, we had never seen anything like it before or since and it was a custom proprietary server so I suspect they had some custom setup going on.
In fact in your case I would tend to lean tword a more recent case we had come through our Zendesk domain involving TLS 1.3 in wolfSSL trying to talk to Filezilla TLS 1.3 which actually turned out to be TLS 1.3 - draft 18 in Filezilla. wolfSSL kept appace with the TLS 1.3 as it progressed and we implemented:
draft-18, draft-22, draft-23, draft-26, draft-28 and finally the final draft: RFC-8446.
Draft 18 was the most common one implemented by us, google, openssl, and several other vendors at the time and then drafts 19 - RFC-8446 came in fairly rapid succession and most other vendors didn't implement them or did only one or two others.
When using RFC-8446 TLS 1.3 to talk to draft-18 TLS 1.3 we have seen the error you're reporting because the handshake progressed differently between the two drafts. Can you check if the TLS 1.3 implementation in your version of openssl is the final draft (RFC-8446) or if it is one of the other draft versions?
Warm Regards,
K