I googled what the brackets do but I still don’t understand why that fixes it, but it does. Thank you so much. You cannot imagine how much annoyance this issue has caused me over the years.
edit: SCRATCH THAT
I’ve found a situation where xclip -o outputs the correct thing, but wl-paste is outputting something different and incorrect, even if I run my bindsym
xclip -o | wl-copy would fix this, if i ran it from alacritty, however, sway isn’t doing it right.