i just found out what was causing this for me.
the newest wp-config has the keys where you can input information inside the quotation marks.
i made the dumb mistake of using two punctuation symbols (an ! and you’re) and that was killing the install (or reinstall) for that matter.
it may be something very obvious to most, but i screwed it up and haven’t read that documented. hopefully that can help someone because it interpreted it as code and threw everything off.