Thanks for helping me to understand this!
I did delete the preferences and it didn’t seem to change the behaviour, but I did lose my nice screen layout presets which is a bummer.
Another question based on this new info:
I have multiple sequences of progressive edits in this big project, would I free up some ram if I deleted these older sequences? What are other ways I can free up RAM in the project? And how do I disable the green bar RT effects? This is a new concept to me.