Hey, all. I just wanted to update that I finally got everything working. I’m still not sure why there was a problem, however my solution was basically to just uninstall nix + home-manager and re-install.
Since I installed using the nix determinate installer, I followed their instructions to uninstall, rebooted, and then reinstalled. I then ran nix run nixpkgs#home-manager -- switch --flake nix/#$USER to reinstall home-manager while pointing to my flake in my ~/nix directory. It prompted me that there were conflicts with my home-manager profiles, so I deleted them all and tried again. (the installer prompts you which files to remove). After that, I was able to build successfully!
Hope this helps some one else in the future.