Tahoe 26.2 How to stop Hard Sleeping

Hi,

I have a M2 MacBook Pro that I am using as a desktop, and in Sequoia I had it set up so that the laptop was always closed, and it would never go to sleep, but after 3 hours it would sleep the monitors. I could then just tap the external keyboard and it would wake up the monitors and I could login.

Since I have switched to Tahoe, the power/sleep settings are a little different and I cannot figure out how to get the same behavior. No matter the settings I have tried, it either is awake all the time and the monitors are always on, or it has the behavior that I had before for a little while but then after a few hours it goes into what I call a Hard Sleep, where the only way to wake it up is to open the laptop and press the power button. It then immediately wakes up.

So basically what I am seeing is that for some reason after a few hours it goes from needing a tap of a key on the external keyboard to wake, to only waking with the power button on the built in keyboard.

I am starting to think this is a bug in Tahoe, but wanted to reach out to everyone and see if someone else has seen this and figured out how to fix it maybe.

I have tried the "Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off" setting both on and off as it seems like this is what I need but in either setting it goes to a Hard Sleep after a few hours. If someone is getting different behavior let me know as maybe this needs to be turned on along with something else.

Thanks for any information to help!