I appreciate your answer, it appears I had some other background syntax error. Decided to rearrange my inputs just a moment ago and somehow fixxored it accimagically.

Youre not crazy, I had this exact issue. I dont have a solution, I mostly stopped using galleries. If I could move images between them I might use them, but I always end up with the wrong file in the wrong gallery and get annoyed anyway so rarely use them. I tried to sort it, had no luck… I tried the same things as you, multiple browsers… never solved it. I found that while the gallery would be empty according to perchance, if I bookmarked the actual image file before they disappeared, I could still access the image - sometimes. Feels like a browser config issue, but I never went back to trying to figure it out.