Thanks for trying that out. I made a test suite of documents - once I saw the problem. I started adding very small images, .png or .jpeg, and then just a bit larger going up to normal size. No matter how many times I tried, the image resampling was turned off, and larger images that were never any problem for TextEdit just halted the Export to PDF process entirely.
I'm not sure how to submit my test suite here - and probably no point, nobody else will care. There will be new AI functions by the zillion, and text editing is probably lowest of any low list.
I thought of reverting to the previous OS, but what does work for me - I edit in TextEdit, and close the document, reopen in Pages, and Export from there, which works.
I do find it curious as to what could have changed. I looked for every possible setting, and reset anything I could to original settings, nothing. Thanks for trying.