This document does not exist and will not appear in queries or snapshots, but identically structured document works

Question

Preface: this question is already asked here but user gave up and gave solution to first answer. This question also differs in that I have two similar collection structures,

Answer 1

This is telling you that territories/6 does not exist as an actual document, whereas territories/7 does.

In Cloud Firestore it is possible to have subcollections owned by "virtual" documents - that is the document at the higher level doesn't exist, but it has children.

These virtual documents can be easy ways to organize information without have to create duplicate dummy documents.

In this case, you've either:

1. Created a bunch of dispatch documents under territories/6 before you created the territories document, or
2. You've subsequently deleted territories/6 without deleting the subcollection documents.