@jgOhYeah I was able to replicate this locally. And I can roughly see what’s happening (with the help of XDebug). Still thinking through how to solve it…
Loading update.php seems to cause this code to run: src/EntityViewsData.php · efc5ae471b40427f19fca3cfe1524f7557d0cabc · project / entity · GitLab
Basically, the Entity API module is trying to add reverse relationships for all entity reference fields so that the Views module knows how to use them. In this case, it’s trying to figure out the database table name for the asset owner field - but this is running before the field is actually created.
I’m not sure why the same thing doesn’t happen during drush updb - or why this code runs while loading update.php…