This message was deleted.

the culprit may have been that I had some new untracked files, but this is still not the behavior i'd expect

What is the output of git status? We might be missing some files in the "unmerged files" section

I unfortunately can't produce the exact output because my file system is no longer in that state, but there were a few untracked files in the output (some temporary CSV/TXT files output by scripts I was working with)