I still don't understand why this happened as it was working great for years and is still working with kernels 6.8.7 or older. But nevertheless sorry if I wasted time of anyone because of broken hardware.
I think the BIOS CM creates the "first" tunnel using reduced capabilities already so this makes the "second" tunnel fit there in the 18G link. Now that we do the reset the "first" tunnel is re-created with max capabilities and that makes the "second" not to fit there anymore.
But now you get the full 40G link :)
Well that's awesome! That confirms there were other issues besides the one Sanath found that get fixed by not reusing BIOS tunnels.