Turns out this was a setting that was hidden. I noticed in the most recent release GOS release a mention about battery restriction settings that have been rearranged.
Settings: add back Unrestricted battery usage option to App battery usage screen to undo the usability regression introduced by Android 14 QPR2 where Optimized vs. Unrestricted was hidden away in an inner mode accessed by pressing the text next to an allow background toggle for controlling the Restricted mode (they likely did this to discourage users enabling Unrestricted, but GrapheneOS users need this much more than stock OS users especially if they don't use sandboxed Google Play and the new UI is very confusing/misleading instead of simply giving users a direct choice between the 3 modes)
I opened up the battery settings for one of these apps, and sure enough, I now saw additional options, and realized that I was not set to "unrestricted" as I had thought. Despite getting the battery usage multiple times and being shunted over to this screen, I never realized there were hidden options, and assumed that the mismatch of nomenclature (unrestricted vs allow in background) was a result of some apps being slow to incorporate updated terminology. Thanks to GOS for adding some clarity back!
rectangle4799 you may find this was your issue as well.