The situation:
On Windows 10 I installed doctl 1.48.1 from the releases page and ran doctl auth init. It accepted my API token and printed OK, then froze and never returned to the prompt, so I had to kill the CMD window. Running with --trace showed the API call returned 200 OK, so auth worked but the init never finished. The reporter confirmed the workaround fixed it and the thread closed in 2020.
What actually fixes it (verified in the thread):
The auth init flow was hanging on Windows after the token validated, so the fix is to skip the interactive flow entirely. Create the config file yourself at %appdata%\\doctl\\config.yaml with just the access-token entry, then run doctl normally. The reporter confirmed doctl works after manually filling the config file, and the maintainer confirmed thats all the file needs to contain. You dont need an elevated CMD either, just read/write access to that file.