I really don’t want to use a mod manager but I guess if no one posts a better fix I’ll do it. The fix to get manually installed mods to work is likely going to be just 1 secret config file change, I just have to figure out what it is.
Edit: MO2 replaces the executable with an executable that I assume is the ui for MO2 which fails to run on my system. This doesn’t patch out the Plugins.txt getting replaced either. I’m not sure that MO2 helps here. This is Skyrim special edition, not the original release. They made the mod situation shittier like they did in Starfield so not all of the same fixes and workarounds that have been working on Linux for the past decade still work.