Missing G21987A mutation in SARS-CoV-2 delta variants due to non-specific amplification by ARTIC v3 primers

I think your explanation makes sense; an amplicon containing the primer base could be produced by the interaction of a ‘run though’ product and amplicon 73 by site-directed mutagenesis. As the pools are mixed then fragmented you have no way to trim the reads properly in this case. The only way I can think of avoiding this is to barcode the pools separately if you are using fragmentation.