uncooluser

Final Update:

After a bunch of time spent on this, I ended up needing to go into PHPMyAdmin and deactivating all plugins manually, which fixed the issue.

Sauce:
https://www.ostraining.com/blog/wordpress/disable-a-wordpress-plugin/

I was able to narrow it down to a combo issue, where a few plugins were the culprits after the caching.

I’ll be trying this plugin again later but for now 😐

UPDATE:

I checked the WP-Settings.php file, and saw some other lines in there

if ( WP_CACHE && apply_filters( 'enable_loading_advanced_cache_dropin', false ) ) {
	// For an advanced caching plugin to use. Uses a static drop-in because you would only want one.
	WP_DEBUG ? include( WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/cache.php' ) : @include( WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/cache.php' );

	// Re-initialize any hooks added manually by advanced-cache.php
	if ( $wp_filter ) {
		$wp_filter = WP_Hook::build_preinitialized_hooks( $wp_filter );
	}
}

Which I removed. Back end is still where it was, but I wanted to share that I discovered this bit of code.