During the process of publishing a folder from dev to prod you end up in the situation where this folder have the same GUID in both environments (the process can be that you try to replace the old items every time).
When you perform the import and select the destination (or give the destination as option for the CLI config tool) you get into issues if you select the folder that you are replacing.
This can be found in the server.log:
ERROR 2020-02-14T07:44:57,214+0100 [sfadmin, #2, #62707] ws.library.LibraryManagerImpl: Problem importing
com.spotfire.ws.library.StorageException: ILLEGAL_ARGUMENT, The item cannot be parent of itself
at com.spotfire.ws.library.StorageItem.<init>(StorageItem.java:152) ~[server.jar:?]
at com.spotfire.ws.library.ImportManager.updateItem(ImportManager.java:1038) ~[server.jar:?]
at com.spotfire.ws.library.ImportManager.insertConflictKeepNewItemIsFolder(ImportManager.java:894) ~[server.jar:?]
at com.spotfire.ws.library.ImportManager.insertIntoLibrary(ImportManager.java:690) ~[server.jar:?]
at com.spotfire.ws.library.ImportManager.importFile(ImportManager.java:358) ~[server.jar:?]
at com.spotfire.ws.library.LibraryManagerImpl$ImportThread.run(LibraryManagerImpl.java:2529) ~[server.jar:?]
at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1149) [?:1.8.0_144]
at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:624) [?:1.8.0_144]
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748) [?:1.8.0_144]
The problem here is that you have tried to import a folder into the folder with the same GUID (since the replace option means that the GUIDs of the import will be retained).