Those last two sessions were incredibly frustrating. I felt that I may not be up to this.
Analyzing what happened, however, there were five errors:
One was not knowing how to properly log in as root. Now I know.
A second was a typo I made.
A third was caused by Google AI Mode telling me to (not) log in as root in a different way.
A fourth was from Google AI Mode telling me to change a bunch of permissions.
A fifth stems from the manual not explicitly directing that /sources should be owned by lfs and not showing a schema of what the $LFS directories permissions should be.
I decided I could live with that set of errors.