I didn’t mean to suggest anything along the lines of something fundamental and outside the scope of the plugin like storing unix timestamps with more memory, more along the lines of whether it’s feasible to not convert to unix timestamps whenever it’s being pulled from the wpdb, where they’re stored as strings in Y-m-d H:i:s format.
Seems that the cause of that was due to the date not converting to text. But after correcting that, now all I get is an internal server error and no start date imported.
Added a screenshot to the drive folder of the import dialogue indicating that I used the wrong datetime format despite the dialogue showing clearly that I followed it.