well, here's a new wrinkle. I had been trying all week to install Magisk the way they say to in the official instructions here: https://topjohnwu.github.io/Magisk/install.html#patching-images This was really just obsession, I don't have a huge need for root anymore. But no matter what I did, root didn't take and every time I went back to the app it didn't indicate I had root. I was honestly about to give up, but I hate to be defeated by computers. Lol.
So I tried on last hail mary. I rebooted into recovery and without reinstalling anything else, I retried my old method of flashing Mag