WordPress not respecting template hierarchy (fetches index.php instead of single.php or page.php)

I’m going to answer my own question for the sake of people who might run in the same issue as me

in my setup I had a plugin handling taxonomies; one of these had the rewrite slug set to “year” – well, it turns out this conflicts probably with date based archives (?) and caused my posts and pages not loading but rather redirecting the user to the blog home – evidently there was some issue in WordPress templating hierarchy; I haven’t investigated further

I didn’t catch the error quickly because I didn’t flush permalinks properly while deactivating plugins – also for some reason the error appeared randomly (sometimes my permalinks DID work despite the taxonomy rewrite was still set)

I ended up by renaming the slug into “period”, then deleting the .htaccess, recreating it, and creating/flushing permalinks from WordPress permalinks page

that seems to have fixed it once and for all

so… if you happen to be in a similar situation, check check check everything that is altering the permalink structure in some manner, even custom post types and taxonomies, think about the slug you’re using and if it may conflict with something else even not obvious

cheers

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