If “what” and “is” were truly being ignored, I would have expected the results to be pretty much the same.
Keyword exception in the results content does not mean they are being ignored as search phrases. The words can still fuzzy match, it only means, that these words were not indexed to search for. Keywords having parts of these ignored words are still indexed.
The exceptions are applied for the results, not for the phrases.
If you want to fully ignore words from the phrase entered, you can also do that here: https://i.imgur.com/pUBgE7F.png
That will yield the same exact results for both cases.