IOS 26 - Now I have to turn off alarms on BOTH my Watch and my iPhone

I updated all of my devices to IOS 26 a few days ago. Mostly great, but one huge annoyance...

I have sleep set up on my iPhone 16 Pro and Apple Watch Series 8 (which are synced) from 11:00pm until 7:00am. With IOS 18 (and previous versions) I could set my morning alarm for 7:00am and it would go off on both devices at the same time (which they still do on IOS 26). This has been set for a few years... no adjustments have been made since.

With IOS 18 when the alarm went off I would see "Snooze" or "Stop" options on my watch, and if I hit "Stop" the alarm would stop on both devices. Perfect. OR... If the phone was on the nightstand facing me, I would see the same options on the phone screen, and if I did not hit the stop button on my watch, I could touch the stop button on the phone instead, and again, both devices would stop. Perfect again.

But we don't live in a perfect world...

Since IOS 26... The same options appear on the watch. However, when I hit stop, the alarm on the watch stops, but the phone alarm keeps going and going until I unlock the phone, then it stops simply from being unlocked. I don't see the options on the locked phone screen to Stop or Snooze either before, or after, I see them on my watch.

So the annoying part is sometimes my wife stays up late (insomnia) like 4:00am. When my watch goes off I can quickly turn the alarm off, but now I also have to turn the phone alarm off - and by the time I hit both (the extra 10 seconds), she's awake. The other annoying part is this shouldn't be happening, but yeah... perfect world thing.

Does anyone else have this happening? Any clue what to do to set this up how it was 4 days ago so one "Stop" would stop both alarms?

Once again, going through the menus on both devices isn't helping, nor are Google searches. and yes... I have tried powering off, then powering on both devices. Everything else seems to sync perfectly between the two. For example I started a workout on my phone only for outdoor cycling, and 20 seconds later the watch automatically started showing the progress, same as always.