I contacted Microsoft Support this morning to try to get a resolution to the problem. Not sure that it was all a waste of time. In the end the support person suggested that I send a feedback message with regards to the issue. See below for the MS response. I would ask all of you that are experiencing the problem to navigate to the feedback link and post a response. MS, as you can appreciate, have a gigantic number of bugs and issues that are being worked on, on a daily basis. The more responses there are, then the more likely that the issue will be fixed.
Thank you for waiting I really appreciate your efforts and patience, as I have checked and it seems to be an ongoing issue as other users have mentioned the same issue with the latest phone link app version, I appreciate you bringing this concern to our attention and would request you to please submit feedback about this issue on the feedback hub link which I am sharing with you so that the dedicated developers team can get your feedback about the latest app version and get the changes fixed with the next update version for the app. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/send-feedback-to-microsoft-with-the-feedback-hub-app-f59187f8-8739-22d6-ba93-f66612949332