My experience, for what it's worth, is that when something is going on bad above ground on a fig tree like your Celeste's late wake up from winter's rest, there's something going on bad underground that caused it.....root rot is my hunch. Too much wet over winter, causing root rot, does what you experienced. There were not enough live roots left to support timely, normal growth.

As your tree thankfully recovered, although showing very late dormancy break, it put its energy into growing new green growth more than in fruiting. The most badly injured sections were responding with very late new growth out of season, due to still being in recovery mode and not "realizing" it is fall. This is my opinion on what you have experienced.

My thoughts are that if your tree is not subjected to too much winter wet from now on, it will return to being a healthy tree, performing normally. Fig trees are very resilient.

Moses

Thanks.... I used to have two big, productive trees out back, but both were done in by our all-time low temp of -3F decades ago.