Nevermind. Figured it out. Before all the excludes, I had “C:\Users\” - and it needed to be “C:\Users” without the trailing “\”.
So, it was treating all the excludes as paths to include, or something to that effect. It’s working now. Leaving my headache here for others to learn from my many mistakes lol.
Also I think the correct exclude nomenclature is:
–exclude=“Temporary Internet Files/**”
For anyone who’s interested.