i may have found the problem.
We are using a slightly modified version of the default Kickstart default provisioning template, but with the last update that introduced the eject/disconnect cdrom changes, it was changed slightly to correctly eject the drive. I didn’t notice these changes in any release notes i read before upgrading and so our custom default kickstart template did not include those changes.
Just went through both side-by-side and updated our version, testing it now.