Photos are duplicated and tripled on iPhone 13 when moving to an album

I understand that the "Albums" on an iphone are actually just pointing to where photos are (rather than duplicating them). But my phone has just started doing something weird.

I moved about a dozen photos dating from 2016 & 2017 to Album "A", so they'd be easy to grab for a social media post.

All the photos I moved now show up in my recents, despite the fact that they have not been edited or synced in any way.

So now these same photos appear in three places:

(1) in the original camera roll chronologically (I can see them when I scroll back to 2016)

(2) in Album A

(3) in my Recents

Deleting them from Recents also deletes them from Album A, but not from their original spot in the camera roll. So for some reason the phone is creating duplicate copies. This is super annoying because I'm constantly pulling archived photos together into separate albums to make it easier to edit a reel or to cut a slideshow on a particular theme. I have over 20,000 photos on my phone and I've always worked this way with no problems. Now my Recents Album is full of every photo I've ever moved.

When they all get moved to recents, it creates a giant confusing mess.

iCloud is turned off, so I know it's not a syncing issue.