Solved!! It turns out the problem was in fact relying on WPS Office messing around with the mime types. My sister’s laptop running fedora didn’t encounter this issue because she is using the multilanguage snap version.
The solution is this:
" Well, actually the issue seem to be that WPS-Office is adding a ~/.local/share/mime/packages/Override.xml file and running update-mime-database
By deleting that file and adding common\do_not_detect_file_association_while_startup=true to ~/.config/Kingsoft/Office.conf and subsequently running sudo update-mime-database -V ~/.local/share/mime/ you can get rid of the bogus file association. "
Here’s the link of the post 
Hope this helps more people like me in the future! 