Trying to setup SSH key pair for root

Setting up SSH keys for root (technically ed25519 keys). Created the key pair on server I want to logon FROM and put the pub key onto the authorized key file of the server I want to connect TO.

I can login with ssh keys with my user(regular user), but not as the root user.

File permissions:

[root@MyTargetServer .ssh]# ls -hal
total 16K
drwx------. 2 root root   75 Jan  4 23:52 .
dr-xr-x---. 4 root root 4.0K Oct 20 14:22 ..
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 1.2K Jan  4 23:52 authorized_keys
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  171 Oct 20 14:22 known_hosts

I made sure I modified the /etc/ssh/sshd_config to contain:
PermitRootLogin yes

I tried to restart the service and wondering if that’s the issue?

sshd.service - OpenSSH server daemon
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/sshd.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: activating (auto-restart) (Result: exit-code) since Thu 2023-01-05 00:06:14 EST; 28s ago
     Docs: man:sshd(8)
           man:sshd_config(5)
  Process: 14165 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/sshd -D $OPTIONS $CRYPTO_POLICY (code=exited, status=255)
 Main PID: 14165 (code=exited, status=255)

Jan 05 00:06:14 MyTargetServer systemd[1]: sshd.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=255/n/a
Jan 05 00:06:14 MyTargetServer systemd[1]: sshd.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Jan 05 00:06:14 MyTargetServer systemd[1]: Failed to start OpenSSH server daemon.

However – I am still ssh’ed into the machine while I’m doing all this, and I can login with ssh keys using that normal user. So I THINK the problem is that I can’t ssh in as root.

I have gotten this to work with other servers, but not finding the delta between those and these new ones.