Split-gpg and emacs and epa-mode

In an AppVM I have emacs installed, and split-gpg.
I (try to) document admin changes to various stuff, and if I need to put some secrets into the documents (which are synced to a local gitea instance) I will create a file.gpg with the secrets. This usually works fine, unless I desire to decrypt.

I always get:

Error while decrypting with "/home/user/bin/gpg2":

gpg: encrypted with rsa4096 key, ID XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, created 2000-01-01
      "joe@example.com"
gpg: encrypted with rsa4096 key, ID YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY, created 2000-01-01
      "fred@example.com"

The ~/bin/gpg2 is a copy of the client wrapper, modified so as to hard link the output file for subsequent examination.

From this (the output file), I see that the decryption did in fact succeed.

[GNUPG:] PROGRESS - ? 0 0 B
[GNUPG:] ENC_TO XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 1 0
[GNUPG:] ENC_TO YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 1 0
[GNUPG:] KEY_CONSIDERED ... 0
[GNUPG:] KEY_CONSIDERED ... 0
[GNUPG:] KEY_CONSIDERED ... 0
[GNUPG:] KEY_CONSIDERED ... 0
[GNUPG:] DECRYPTION_KEY .... .... u
[GNUPG:] NO_SECKEY ....
[GNUPG:] BEGIN_DECRYPTION
[GNUPG:] DECRYPTION_INFO 2 9 0
[GNUPG:] PLAINTEXT 62 1633688062 
[GNUPG:] PLAINTEXT_LENGTH 224
;; -*- epa-file-encrypt-to: ("..." "..." "...") -*-
SuperSecretStuff
[GNUPG:] PROGRESS - ? 1289 0 B
[GNUPG:] DECRYPTION_OKAY
[GNUPG:] GOODMDC
[GNUPG:] END_DECRYPTION

Anyone else using epa mode in emacs with split-gpg?

FWIW: I am supposedly completely up to date w.r.t. the most recent 4.1 announcement.