Solved How to ADD a new file type extension to the default app list?

I did a reinstall of Windows 11 and the problem is gone. As you can see, the ALWAYS button is back. Must have had a registry issue or some other critical windows fill got dinged. We had a power failure two days ago and I bet that caused it.

FWIW I had the same issue and resolved it by deleting the problematic extension's registry key underneath "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\". After doing that the "Always" option returned.