The site had two child theme folders with nearly identical names, one of them a leftover from years back. We pushed styles to the leftover four times.
Every round went the same way: the push succeeded, the file timestamp updated, the contents were right, and nothing on the page changed.
This kind of failure has no error message
Push to a path that doesn’t exist and you get an error. Break the file’s syntax and you get an error. Push to a place that exists but that nothing reads, and nothing happens at all.
Over those four rounds we checked, in order: the cache, file permissions, stylesheet load order, selector specificity. All reasonable guesses. None of them was the cause.
One line settles it
Run this once on the server and ask which stylesheet directory is active:
get_stylesheet_directory()It returns the one actually in use, not the one we inferred from a folder name.
The rule
⛔ Don’t infer a system’s state from folder names. We chose the names. The state belongs to the system.
This holds elsewhere too. A path in a config file, a connection method in a code comment, a schedule written in the docs: each one is something somebody believed at some point. To know how things are now, ask the machine.
