Seemingly the issue is that you're screwing your deck too far. You don't have spare o rings for your kit? You might have lost the oring at the base of the cage, when it screws onto the base. It's a thin one, at the base of the cage screw.
Never screwed the deck further than a light twist until it stopped. Never wrenched on it. I have been assembling it the same way for months and something has changed.
Unfortunately, I lost one of the original tank seals quite a while back during a cleaning, swapped them out with the spares and seem to have misplaced the rest.
Cage base o-ring present.