Diskutils linux reader and ext2fsd were used. The latter never showed files, the former seemed to work but after rebooting into linux my root partition and home had this issue. They were both a able to be mounted but my large steam games partition has been spamming numbers on the screen after fsck.ext4 -y for at least 15 minutes....
I hope all the games aren't lost on there.
Is it really just diskutils that caused this? Someone recommended the software on a linux forum and I think I obtained from official source.
Before the number spam started the fixes seemed to say things like "this could be shorter..."
Numbers spam paused briefly and switched to wrong number of block count messages. Numbers spam resumed.
https://ibb.co/7SqvHDS image of issue
Ok.. after about 30 minutes of that ... it seems like everything did get fixed, my machine is now booting past maintenance mode and everything got mounted, and ... it doesn't look like I had actual data loss despite the insane number of fixes that took place ... If anyone reads this that has insight on what could have corrupted ... something I'd be interested in hearing what might have happened. I'm definitely going to avoid any windows ext4 filesystem reading utilities, they don't work well and even when read-only it seems they can really screw things up.