LE 12.2.1 x86_64 What happened to "automatic" playlists / playing all files in a folder?

Issue:
Pre-12x: navigating to any music folder with the "Music" option and playing and single song resulted in what I assume was some sort of "automatic" playlist where all song in that folder would play. I would prefer to get this behavior back if possible.

12.x: Now, it plays one song and says there's nothing else in the playlist.

Is there a primer on managing playlists? I don't see anything on the Wiki. I've tried to use the UI to generate a playlist, and they simply seem to vanish into the aethers after I save them. No new playlist gets generated. I'm saving them as .pls - is that acceptable? (clearly: no lol)
And I seem to have one singular playlist from some time in the past (again, that I can't seem to locate via browsing the UI) that plays any time I put any song in a playlist, and when I select "Party Mode" this mystery playlist is somehow all that ever gets cued. If I clear the playlist and come back to the music player later this playlist is back, with the same dozen songs from a random directory in my library.

Quote from chewitt

Have you read https://kodi.wiki/view/Playlists ?

lol - wow - I kept my wiki search as simple as possible and used "playlist" and did not find that page. I appreciate the pointer.

I have successfully created a playlist and can open it via the standard context menu for playlists.

Kodi:~/.kodi/userdata/playlists/music # ls -la
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         86966 Dec  7 17:28 Christmas Tunes.m3u8

Kodi:~/.kodi/userdata/playlists/music # head Christmas\ Tunes.m3u8
#EXTCPlayListM3U::M3U
#EXTINF:151,13. Bing Crosby - Christmas Dinner Country Style
/var/media/Media/Music/Christmas Tunes/Bing Crosby - Bing Crosby's Christmas Classics/Bing Crosby - Christmas Dinner Country Style.flac
#EXTINF:167,11. Bing Crosby - Do You Hear What I Hear?
/var/media/Media/Music/Christmas Tunes/Bing Crosby - Bing Crosby's Christmas Classics/Bing Crosby - Do You Hear What I Hear.flac
#EXTINF:136,09. Bing Crosby - Frosty the Snowman
/var/media/Media/Music/Christmas Tunes/Bing Crosby - Bing Crosby's Christmas Classics/Bing Crosby - Frosty the Snowman.flac
#EXTINF:188,08. Bing Crosby - Hark! The Herald Angels Sing / It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
/var/media/Media/Music/Christmas Tunes/Bing Crosby - Bing Crosby's Christmas Classics/Bing Crosby - Hark! The Herald Angels Sing - It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.flac
#EXTINF:172,02. Bing Crosby - Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

But non-function weirdness continues. The playlist still only plays one song and quits. If I start a song and let it complete it just exits. If I start a song in the playlist and hit "next" it just exits. If I play 7 or 8 random songs in the playlist (by opening the playlist and selecting them), then use the left context menu to look at "current playlist" all I see are those 7 or 8 songs - the playlist I created and selected seems to be gone from the playlist.

I still don't know why the default behavior of playing all files in a directory was removed, but it's gone, so I guess it's gone.