From the little reading I’ve been doing and from my own little experience from losing 15kg in 3 months.
If more muscle and less fat is your goal as opposed to just less mass overall. Then you want to do fewer long extended sessions of exercise and move towards shorter high intensity exercises.
Longer exercises have been shown to reduce muscle mass along with the fat too. While short high intensity bursts are shown to give similar fat reduction but maintain the muscle mass.
This is what current day body builders do during their cutting phase when preparing for a competition and to get super lean. They absolutely need to maintain that muscle mass but cut down on the fat content and even water levels when get closer still to competition day. Many of the top competitors have switched over to shorter bursts of high intensity training rather than the old long and steady cardio type training.
And yes as has been said you need keep cutting down on your food portion sizes as you get smaller. I have smart scales and would track the weight loss on an app. The graph looked very step like. I’d loose a bunch of weight one week then plateau another week then I realised I need to cut down on portion sizes so would loose weight again .. and repeat!
I think with everything the size of gains you achieve get smaller and smaller so you need to try harder and harder the less fat you have. Getting to around 15% body fat is fine with a general eat less carbs and small portion sizes and exercise lots methodology. But to get to 10-12% and lower you really need to start being very structured with your diet and exercise plan.