Win 10 Pro - I think I might have figured it out. You were on the right track, the local permission for this specific site got messed up. I used this to reset to default and things are working now for the site in question ( cloning…etc. ). Just confirming when the permissions got corrupted.
icacls “full path to the folder” /reset /t /c /l
I did this a the for the entire \app\public folder and subfolders.