I think I figured out Vercel's sketchy env variable clobbering. I have been using the 'rotate' feature to change secrets. Well it turns out that when you use this feature it changes both staging and production env variables at the same time, whereas using just edit, changes the specific env variable you are actually trying to change. In other words it's trying to be helpful, even though it completely breaks everything.
The UI has another button that you can click to after rotate, that gives you a way to change both independently. Absolutely horrendous design. But then again what do I know about software. There is no doubt an entire peoples completely reliant on this feature for completely non-obvious reasons, and by me mentioning this here somewhat sarcastically I have probably caused a genocide.
I don't know. Bugs are good, E's are good, guilt's are good. What else in upside down world is good? #