Cannot launch server even after disabling mod

[tindomerel]

Background: I have been working on developing my first character mod. I had some success, including a character, a set of tools, a set of armor/hat, which all worked. I attempted to refactor some of the shared code into a couple functions in a file I named util.lua and added a few more pieces of functionality to each of the tools. I'm not sure which step was where things went wrong, because I didn't test after the refactor (it was quite minimal, so I didn't think to).

Behavior: When I try to host a game, I see the "Launching Server" popup (with the moving dots and the "Cancel" button. It sits with this popup up for about 3 or 5 minutes, then shows "Dedicated Server Failed to Start. There was some sort of trouble starting the server. Please try again." The logs give me no errors (earlier while I was developing the mod, I would check the logs and find meaningful error messages that I could use to track down and fix the problem). The final line in the log every time now is "[00:00:00]: [Steam] SteamGameServer_Init(10999, 27016)," every time in both caves and main server logs. This line appears in the first second or so of attempting to start the server, and nothing else is added to the logs during all the time the game shows "Launching Server." The client logs don't show anything wrong except eventually receiving a shutdown signal from the server after the "Dedicated Server Failed to Start." The server launch doesn't get far enough for there to even be any logs in any of the Cluster # folders (actually I don't think one of those is even created).

What I've tried: 

Disabling the mod. Problem continues.

Disabling all mods (client- & server-side). Problem continues.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the game. Problem continues.

Uninstalling the game, deleting every single game-related file from my computer (from My Documents/Klei to steamapps/common/Don't Starve Together, even the modding tools), reinstalling the game, and setting up all my settings again. Problem is fixed temporarily.

If I try to add my in-development mod back in, the problem reappears and I'm back in the same boat where nothing works and the logs are useless.

 

The strangest part is that even when I roll back my code (I'm using git, so I can be certain that when I roll it back, I'm going back to the exact same files as before) to a version of the mod that previously worked, it still causes this problem to start now, even though it previously worked with no problems.

 

I've spent over 8 hours trying to troubleshoot this, and I just can't get anywhere without meaningful logs. The logs attached are from the server failing to start with 0 mods (client or server) active. Has anyone seen this before, or does anyone have an idea for a place to start troubleshooting further?

caves_server_log.txt client_log.txt master_server_log.txt

[tindomerel]

As best as I can tell, this issue was related to this: 

The exact same code works again now.