It looks like 2.5.0.beta3 was released on April 22, 2020 and the fix I made for this issue was released on April 14, 2020 so you should be able to create an active user via the API with a single request.
Can you verify your requests and response look similar to this curl command:
curl -i -sS -X POST "http://localhost:3000/users" \ -H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data;" \ -H "Api-Key: 079fb2bb12d3b436bb11bde8eb58aaa9a36560fa7d79b14b3087aa40b1ebc2c4" \ -H "Api-Username: blake.erickson" \ -F "name=8fe87241ca91a69f5ccd" \ -F "username=8fe87241ca91a69f5ccd" \ -F "email=8fe87241ca91a69f5ccd@example.com" \ -F "password=c9193506a8f5e402a88cf2f8cee3f258" \ -F "active=true" \ -F "approved=true" HTTP/1.1 200 OK { "success": true, "active": true, "message": "Your account is activated and ready to use.", "user_id": 10 }