LMAO it was user error. I had been following this guide: https://www.name.com/blog/how-to-get-nostr-verified-on-a-custom-domain

The issue was when I copied and pasted the JSON into GitHub's text editor, for whatever reason it didn't like the " character that preceded my hex pubkey. It was highlighted as invalid JSON but I just didn't catch it. Deleted the double quotes, re-typed them, voila... valid JSON.

LFG