Using the gradient tool (G) reduces my object transparency to 0

This issue has been plaguing me for a while now. It's occured across all versions of illustrator from roughly 2021 to 2024 and across different MacBook pro's, both M2 and M3. I have reached out to Adobe's technical team who could not offer me any assistance without a screen recording or remote access which I can't do on a company machine.

The issue itself is pretty self explanatory: I have a simple object selected with any linear/radial gradient applied, I push G to bring up the gradient slider tool and it immediately sets my transparency to 0. The transparency shows up as being unedited on the transparency window, ie: it still reads as 100% or 50% or whatever it was, the but object itself is completely transparent. If I then try to manually change the transparency back to 100% nothing happens and illustrator seems to hang for a few seconds. I ususally have to undo 5 or 6 times to get back to a state where my object is back to it's previous tranparency setting. I believed it may have been a keyboard binding setting as I usually set my "Trim view" to cmd 4 but I've since stopped doing it and the problem has persisted. I've also tried resetting my preferences which briefly solves the problem, but it does come back. I've also tried reinstalling without saving preferences multiple times to the same effect, the problem is briefly solved but eventually starts back up again.

I haven't found a single thing online about anyone else encountering this issue and would appreciate if any assistance as it is rather frustrating and I work with gradient's a lot.