All credit goes to @mborzecki1 who correctly identified the error message as a false positive and pointed us both in the right direction. I just took the leap and changed the permissions back, lol!
I did some digging around but couldn’t figure that out myself, although in my case the owner and group were changed to the user associated with gnome. I think it might’ve been caused by my attempts to solve issues with the way the system thinks my monitors are arranged at system boot-up. It thinks they are side-by-side versus stacked. Good luck figuring out what happened!
sharing is quite literally caring in this case!