As the title says, what is this mode thing (see picture above)? How did I "activate" (?) it and how do I get rid of it.
Simply Googling "vim normal paste" or "vim paste mode" didn't get me anywhere.
Also note that I'm in neovim, but I've somehow launched this before in vim as well.
I figured it out myself, but I figured I already typed up the question, might as well fill out the answer since I've had issues getting Google to help me with this.
tl;dr PASTE is an actual mode in Vim/Neovim that changes some settings that makes pasting things into Vim/Neovim more robust/predictable.
Still not sure how it came on (probably detected that I was pasting a bunch of stuff I guess), but to turn it off and on respectively:
:set paste
:set nopaste
For more info, go to :help paste. There's also a pastetoggle thing that you can adjust if you don't want to type it out.
Shoutout to this question/answer for helping me. It never came up in google for whatever reason, but the "similar questions" feature in stackOverflow was able to get it to me.