NFC Malfunction with IPhone 15

(Running IOS 18.1.1 on iPhone 15) NFC scanning is supposed to be automatically happening all the time with my our iPhone 15 (iPhone 13 or later). There is no setting for it in Settings and no way to manually start scanning. Well, my iPhone DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY SCAN for NFC tags. You can touch it at the top any which way you want, it will not trigger ANYTHING. Now, if you are using Wallet or any other app that manually triggers a scan, it works perfectly fine. I can use Apple Pay to buy stuff with my credit cards, I can use the Shortcuts app and go to the Automations feature and trigger the phone to scan a tag manually as if I was setting up an Automation, but otherwise, there is no way to get the phone to scan. I see some people going into Control Center and using a manual scan button, like the one I see in the Automations section of the Shortcuts app, which looks like the Wi-Fi button, only turned 90% facing right to activate scanning or deactivate it. I don't have that. There is no option in my Control Center for NFC, and It doesn't exist in the "More Options" section. What is going on here? 1.) For god's sake, why is there not an option to turn on and off NFC, just in general? Why can I turn on and off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Mobile Data, and every other radio connection of my phone BUT NFC? 2.) Assuming the answer is the default, "So idiots don't disable this function of their phone and make their super sexy, easy to use features not work.", that logic obviously can't be true in this case because I've seen practically infinite posts about NFC issues with iPhones, so that clearly isn't working. But, I assume these millions of walkthroughs online are essentially not helping and many people have the issue I HAVE. My NFC reader is clearly working perfectly. Every tag I manually scan with the Shortcuts app/Automation set-up where I force the phone to scan works perfectly. All my attempts to pay in stores work. There's nothing wrong with the hardware, JUST THE SOFTWARE. So, primarily, I cannot have 2 factor authentication using FIDO-2 security keys with my iCloud account because my iPhone won't let me log into iCloud using Safari or Chrome on MY OWN IPHONE, because my NFC reader won't activate to scan my NFC-enabled security key and of course, there is only a lightning port, so I cannot plug in the key directly. I also figure I'll use my other phone to login (Google Pixel 8 Pro), but when I use Chrome to attempt to log into iCloud, icloud.com says "This browser doesn't support security keys." When it very clearly does and has for a very long time. I have no problem using my security keys to log into my Google Administrator account using FIDO-2 keys on my Pixel AND my iPhone using NFC. So Chrome (when being controlled by google.com) has no problem activating my iPhone's NFC reader to scan for my security key, but Safari, and Chrome (when being controlled by icloud.com) assume that my phone is automatically scanning, but it's not. So, what am I to do? How can I get my iPhone 15's NFC reader scanning automatically, or have manual control over the reader to force a scan? Anyone have the slightest?