Default kernel choice ignored

So based on the output you’ve provided it appears that RH uses the old method of implementing the “BLS” or boot loader spec. That means the grub.cfg in …/EFI/Rocky/ is not a stub pointing to /boot as it is on RL9. The target of grub2_mkconfig in this case should be /boot/efi/EFI/Rocky/grub.cfg .
Since you say you are trying to specify the default kernel which just happens to be the current latest kernel, does this mean you had in the past specified a different kernel? If so, what means did you use to do that?
There is one more thing that would be good to know and that is the output of this:

grep -i grub_default /etc/default/grub

To boot the latest kernel the value of that output should = 0