Yes, there is, and I should have seen it sooner, more than likely I didn’t see it because of the shorthand array syntax which I don’t use. The meta query needs to be a nested array
'meta_query' => [[
'key' => 'the_related',
'value' => '"' . get_the_ID() . '"',
'compare' => 'LIKE',
]]
or the way I would write it`
‘meta_query’ => array(
array(
‘key’ => ‘the_related’,
‘value’ => ‘”‘ . get_the_ID() . ‘”‘,
‘compare’ => ‘LIKE’,
)
),
`
