Wasted almost the same three hours on a client site last month fighting a modal that kept vanishing under a header. Bumped the z-index on that thing so many times I lost count, felt like a total fool when I finally opened dev tools and saw the parent had a filter on it. That filter did the exact same thing your transform did and made its own stacking context, so my giant numbers never had a chance. Now I literally scan the parent chain for transform, filter, opacity under 1, and position fixed before I even touch the z-index. Takes two minutes and has saved me so many afternoons. Your bakery story makes me feel way less alone in this.

We repainted our living room two years ago with Behr's "Polar Bear" and I swore the color was wrong for months, turns out we had 4000K bulbs in the ceiling fan the whole time. Swapping those to 2700K did not fix anything though, it just made the room look dingy and yellow to me, like a hotel from 1998. Warm light hides dirt and makes everything look soft and cozy but it also kills contrast, which is why your navy towels suddenly "work" with the oak floor, they stopped popping and just blend into a warm blur. I'll take the greenish cast at 3am over a room that looks like it's lit by candlelight at noon. Cool bulbs make whites look white and colors look like the can you bought, and if your paint reads green under 5000K that is the paint being green, not the bulb lying to you.