Mismatch in SDK version returned by GMSServices

[alexp25]

I encountered an issue when trying to upgrade to SDK version 8.4 from 7.4 in hope there would be performance improvements to marker rendering.
In my Capacitor app I have this Podfile:

// ...

target 'App' do
  capacitor_pods
  # Add your Pods here
    # Add your Pods here
  pod 'GoogleMaps', '~> 8.4' # Or use the latest version available
  pod 'CapacitorFirebaseAnalytics/Analytics', :path => '../../node_modules/@capacitor-firebase/analytics'
  
end

I have modified the Capacitor plugin @capacitor/google-maps that depends on this SDK to also use GoogleMaps version 8.4:

// ...

target 'Plugin' do
  capacitor_pods
  pod 'GoogleMaps', '~> 8.4' # Or use the latest version available
  # pod 'Google-Maps-iOS-Utils', '~> 4.2' # For clustering support
end

.podspec:

require 'json'

package = JSON.parse(File.read(File.join(__dir__, 'package.json')))

Pod::Spec.new do |s|
  s.name = 'CapacitorPluginGoogleMaps'
  s.version = package['version']
  s.summary = package['description']
  s.license = package['license']
  s.homepage = 'https://capacitorjs.com'
  s.author = package['author']
  s.source = { :git => 'https://github.com/ionic-team/capacitor-plugins.git', :tag => package['name'] + '@' + package['version'] }
  s.source_files = 'ios/Plugin/**/*.{swift,h,m,c,cc,mm,cpp}', 'google-maps/ios/Plugin/**/*.{swift,h,m,c,cc,mm,cpp}'
  s.ios.deployment_target  = '13.0'
  s.dependency 'Capacitor'
  s.dependency 'GoogleMaps', '~> 8.4'
  s.swift_version = '5.1'
  s.static_framework = true
end

In the plugin Pods/GoogleMaps/Example/Podfile I see this, so my project is updated to version 8.4.0:

source 'https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git'

target 'GoogleMapsSwiftXCFrameworkDemos' do
    platform :ios, '14.0'
    pod 'GoogleMaps', '= 8.4.0'
end

However, calling print("GMS SDK version: (GMSServices.sdkLongVersion())") on iOS installed app still returns: GMS SDK version: 7.4.0 (74.5) which raises some doubts that it's actually updated to 8.4 after all

Is this normal, or am I missing something?