That's why I only use local accounts and save the key elsewhere.

I’m sure they have a record of the old key even though it’s not displayed in the account

That is a ludicrous approach by Microsoft. Totally predicable that people will buy a new computer and set it up before transferring data from their old machine. I feel for all the future victims of this monumental fail.

I'm VERY curious as to how the recovery keys are stored, server side. It seems to me that MS having your recovery key somewhere would weaken the core concept. Anyway, some other piece of advice would be to keep a safe, physical, local record of your recovery keys and/or to not link a MS account to your OS (which is harder and harder to do these days).