I think I may have corrupted my sudoers file. At any rate I can no longer use the sudo command (always hangs). I’ve read other questions related to this topic and tried to fix (going into Recovery mode for ex) but feels like I don’t know what I’m doing. Pretty sure I caused the problem by using chmod to grant permissions too widely to a folder. This is not uncommon apparently.

Running things like sudo visudo or sudo lsof -i yield:

sudo: /private/etc/sudoers.d is world writable

This is a brand new macbook M3 btw. Was working on getting nginx going, but the certbot process wrote the wretched file to a dir unexpected by the instructions I was following, and log revealed that permission was being denied to private/etc. Trying to obtain permission there with Finder and Terminal is what caused this.