News/page publishing process changes

We've had a workflow in place so that when people create news articles, it runs through a powerautomate workflow first.

The process would be :

1. Create news item, populate content
2. Click "Submit for approval" in the top right.
3. Side panel opens to tick some boxes (to create tags)
4. User clicks "Publish", the workflow is processed
5. A few minutes later it appears on some other pages which have a webpart configured to display this news.

However in recent months, Microsoft seemed to have required all news/pages to have the "Save and close" button in the top left to be clicked first. I'm guessing this is related to the default check in/out workflow that sharepoint uses.

What this has resulted in is much confusion, as the two processes work totally independently, and users dont know that they have to click "Save and close" first before then clicking the "Submit for approval" button to kick off the workflow.

Has anyone else seen this? Can the "save and close" function be incorporated into the flow itself?

The workflow is used to create managed metadata for the article, so that different categories of news can be displayed on different pages. This is not particularly relevant though to this issue i dont think.