Pages -- Autosave functional issues

I have researched this topic extensively. I have asked ChatGPT and Gemini and no one can figure it out. I have Pages on two of my devices. on both devices the Autosave feature for Pages is not working. I saved the document when I opened it and I do not have edited data that is saved. I thought it was because I was saving to iCloud (and yes, I closed Pages on my other device) and so I moved it out of iCloud and into a documents folder on my iMac and the autosave function still did not work. I moved it back to the iCloud and even tried testing the "red button test" where you hover over the red "close application" button and it was not showing anything different. This is not the only document that I have tried either, ever since a couple updates ago, I now have to manually save all of my documents, no matter what in order for them to save and I've even lost full documents that I was editing and in trying to save them, the application crashed which I know has nothing to do with me and it was a fluke.

I've gone into settings to try and find this, I've given the application access to my hard disk (like ChatGPT recommended), I've even restarted my computer and it still is not autosaving. any help would be greatly appreciated as I am about to just take my services to Microsoft Word who never fails to Autosave. Or Google Docs, but they are not as good.. I really like Pages.