

Ok, even though I said I’d wait until tomorrow, I decided to try it again. It seemed to boot more or less normally but I did try someone else’s suggestion and it got audio working again. I did undo the edit I made to the modprobe blacklist and I did keep fluidsynth and pulseaudio uninstalled but I tried using the wireplumber ppa, like someone else suggested and my audio is working again. Granded, I have no idea what actually fixed the issue, so I don’t know who to fully credit but thanks for helping.
While I have already found a working solution, I think the issue wasn’t that it was selecting the wrong device. it was almost as if my normal audio devices didn’t exist for some reason because nothing could see them, even my input devices were missing.