spent this entire week reworking the overall layout of my UI. i am really not sure if this new approach is more performant, but after taking the holiday break and looking at the structure of my project with new eyes, it feels like a more organized way of doing things (see subject). basically, i split the main canvas into three separate versions, rather than overriding one big prefab; as well as moving all of the player references into the player prefab itself. for quite some time all the references on the prefab i assigned in the inspector were being broken on save after building the game. i think there is still work to be done, but the latter did solve this long-standing issue.