PayPal recurring payments are in pending state
From my experience, PayPal Express and PayPal Payments Pro have always conflicted with Civi.  PayPal Standard works fine for both recurring and one-time payments, but the other two options do not work for recurring payments.  My organization went back and forth with PayPal over this issue for months.  Then we tried to fix it on our end with zero positive results.  We finally concluded  based on what others said in this forum that other than PayPal Standard, most PayPal options are not compatible with Civi.  We now take our credit card payments with iATS, which is specifically designed to work with Civi and also have the option of using PayPal Standard if the user prefers it.