I can't reproduce your issue.
The degrading tiles setting apply's immediately during your loaded game so there is no need to restart. You can even see it disabled when you enable my debug mode (Provided you have a continuous tile degradation going on).
It should not reset. None of my code actually changes any settings it just reads them so if something resets you may have other issues (corrupt files? Other mods interfering?).
For me it works like expected and I tested it just now in Factorio 0.18.28.