Completely off topic, but

Unfortunately, I didn’t check that before monkeying with things, so I have no idea if I’ve changed my system accidentally.

Reading this makes me feel so powerful to be as familiar as I am with podman/docker (which to be clear is a modest amount). Just do:

podman run --rm -it debian:latest bash

Then apt install git, check those folders, and finally exit so the entire container gets automatically deleted.

The whole thing is done in a few seconds (or more depending on how long git takes to download and whether the debian image is already cached)

Everyone on Linux should have this in their toolbelt.