@pranathi, sorry, it does seem like there is some wonky issue with this endpoint! It may be a bug. I’ll report it to the devs right away.
In the meantime, there might be a workaround if your project doesn’t currently have multiple locales (or you don’t mind publishing all of them). Despite what the documentation says, could you please try this:
await client.items.publish(itemId, null, {recursive: true});
(Just leave out the body param altogether, despite what the docs say).
That should let the request go through (tested with cma-client-node @ 3.0.6). I’ll follow up with the devs and let you know ASAP if we can fix the underlying bug. Sorry about that!