Hello Martin,
I can’t say for sure if the post had selected all subcategories. But the permalink was generating correctly.
After activating the “fv top level categories” plugin, the post permalinks generated by “the_permalink()” function gave the same result as I mentioned in the 1’st post, instead of /cat1/subcat2/the-post-name.html generated /cat1/the-post-name.html
And this was for all posts, no matter what in what category the post was.