OK.. yea.. apparently how stack storage and references work has changed. Now have to add the subfolder onto the stack name.. Anyone know when this changed?

Your guesses are correct. As of the change you listed below, projects in a self-managed backend (s3, azure blob, etc) are now the same as Pulumi Cloud. https://www.pulumi.com/blog/project-scoped-stacks-in-self-managed-backend/

Ok thanks ill read up