Cart transform expand item changes product type to bundle

I have a cart transform function - it will take the item A and expand into 2 lines, one is the original item A with original price, the other is different item (B) with a free price. After ordering this expanded cart, the original item A throws up an error when adding to cart: The bundle product ‘A’ cannot be added to the cart… anyone know what is happening here?

I’m wondering if this is because product B is free? If you temporarily change product B to have a price, is the error still happening?

B has a price but I am using a price adjustment to make it free

The aim here is when the order is fetched using the Order API, that 2 separate products are retrieved. I engaged with Shopify support, and was told to achieve this I needed to put each item on its own expanded line, which resulted in somehow the item being tagged as a bundle, which is crazy that modifying a cart can somehow modify a product definition. When I add only one expanded item, the Order api only returns one item, you lose the 2 items that need to be fulfilled. Every example does this - they just add the component items into the expanded items array, but like I said, the order api doesn’t return the component items, just one item that represents the bundle

Seems its the cart transform function itself, once I removed the error message on cart went away… but that means I can’t use it