One other weird issue that popped up, I wanted to stress test my PMS to see how many simultaneous hw transcoding streams my CPU could handle, the first stream uses hw encoding (tag shows) then any subsequent streams are not using hw encoding, the two subsequent streams I tried were on a windows machine using web browser (https://plex.tv/), AND the official MS Plex App.
I did try shutting down the stream that was using hw encoding (iPhone 15 Pro) and still neither of the other two would use hw encoding.