I'm a little confused now over the exact nature of the current problem.
I assume this switch was a member of a VC and now is not.
You are trying to use the old XE VC port as a normal XE port.
What seems to be confusing is which port we are talking about your title has xe-2/3 which I assume is xe-0/2/3
your command in first post has xe-0/1/3
But in any case the VC command do show that no interface is currently setup as a VC port.
So I think the next step is to verify that your interface is seen:
Does the interface show up using
show interfaces terse xe-#/#/#
this will verify that the device sees your hardware on the expected port
Is the optics module recognized:
port xe-0/2/3
show chassis pic fpc-slot 0 pic-slot 2
or make pic slot 1 if the interface is xe-0/1/3
are there optics data
show interface diagnostics optics xe-0/2/3