Thanks, I have been working through those, getting the same results from a fedora42 live usb and my cachyos installation. Things work on the fedora liveusb but not on cachyos or on an up to date fedora installation on the same machine. Still digging.
Ok, to the surprise of no one, much less myself, I am an idiot. This was user error. Tested and working not only on a Fedora42 live usb, but also on up to date installations of Fedora, Arch, and CachyOS.
The catch? I had set up a gnome extension called “screen rotate” as part of the workarounds posted here. I disabled that, but at some point when I rotated the screen saw this item in the gnome menu and thinking that it was that extension, turned it off. Oops. Apparently gnome displays it when the screen is not in the default laptop mode. Upon rotating the screen, having it show up, and clicking on it to enable it, things are working.
TL;DR version: I am an idiot. News at 10.