I had "juk" loaded and working properly, then I corrupted the directory that it referenced. It hasn't worked since. I tried using synaptic package manager to uninstall everything and reload; that was unsuccessful. If I specify a folder to play, I get "KDEInit could not launch '/bin/juk'"
??

4.19.0-18-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.208-1 (2021-09-29) x86_64 GNU/Linux
juk installed version: 14:18.08.1-1

A quick test shows it drop a config file ~/.config/jukrc and a folder ~/.local/share/juk

Maybe remove (or backup) those and try again? Odds are you didn't do complete removal...

No sign of either of those files.
And yes, I did manually erase ~/.config/juk (? IIRC) after I removed juk using synaptic and before reloading.

Please elaborate.

I tried to use K3B to write to a file that it did not have permission for. Somehow, that fried the directory structure, leaving a blank hard drive. I reformatted that drive and loaded my (YEAH!) backup.
Screwed up the first time. The drive is titled /common (remember FORTRAN?), so I copied the files from #/media/root/common to /common .
Then I tried to access the music directory using juk . Oops. The files were in /common/common/jukebox not /common/jukebox .
Erased /common/common and reloaded. Back to /common/jukebox , which juk should have been able to find.

What do you mean no sign? I installed juk on debian 11, ran it once, exited, and it had created both those.

You ran it once. I have not successfully run it once since installing it.

I think you mean "reinstalling". That's meaningless if you did have juk installed on the same system, and your OP suggests that you had it working before.
The most obvious explanation is that you still have some config residue somewhere under your $HOME.
Please show us:

I logged in as a different user on the same machine. juk worked just fine.
I copied the ~/.config/jukrc from that user directory to my user directory, changed the ownership, and tried to open the same file that I had opened previously. No joy.
The only positive response from your suggestion was the jukrc file that I had put there.
Makes no sense to me.

I fixed it.
Logging in as root, I changed /home/username to /home/username.bak ; created a new /home/username , changed ownership/permissions, and logged into username.
Sometimes brute force is the easiest answer.

brute force may be easy but it does not help you learn what went wrong nor how to fix it the next time. The suggestions you were given and the info asked for would easily have fixed the issue without using your 'brute force' fix.

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Except that the suggestions given were applied, and were unsatisfactory.