why aren't my read more pages working / permalinks???

are your permalinks set to
custom – /%category%/%postname%/

yeah but it still adds that extra /index

is there a workaround for this

Did you have the wordpress in index directory if so you will have to go in database and in options table change every where you have your url as https://www.yourdomainname.com/index t0 your domain name.
best way is just dump the table and in a editor find and replace and than reupload the table.

how would i find this database

Probably via phpMyAdmin, which most hosting providers offer in their control panel.

is there a possibly a way that doesn’t involve such a massive edit, because i just looked inside an information_schema database and am worried about editing such a large portion of data.

i fixed it by editing my index.php

May be this video will help you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sydfh3s84js
shows you how to edit the options table.

Your read more links in posts still has index in url