Weird artifact on outlined text

Trying to get my illustrator prepared for a laser cutter. The laser demands that any cut lines be 100% rgb red and .001.

First I placed a text symbol with the text tool then created outlines. Then removed the compound path. Then gave it a 1 pt rgb red stroke. So far...looks good.

Then I set the stroke to .001pt as required by the laser cutter. Suddenly I am getting weird light red (not really pink but say 50% opacity red) artifacts along the path. When I send it to the laser cutter, these appear as rasters, not vectors.

I have Illustrator 2024 on a Mac, but this also happened on a pc with Illustrator 2022. I recreated the same steps on the laser lab computer and it worked fine, but disappointingly it didn't have the font I really wanted to use.