iirc klipper on kde syncs them by default

I wonder why that is lol

I solved my problem already; wl-paste was able to set up a situation that’s pretty acceptable to me (which, BTW, actually will preserve your ability to highlight text and then paste something from CLIPBOARD into something else if you want to). Helix over ssh still can only manage to yank text into one of the clipboards, and not the other, but I have invested enough of my free time into this problem at this point and don’t really want to delve into the reasons for that any further since I have a workflow that semi-works and whatever it’s fine.

Like I said in one of the other comments, adding the ability to paste text from any of the last N copies would solve your problem as well as many others, and it would also degrade gracefully into acceptable behavior instead of degrading into inability to copy-paste as the current system does. I’ve already solved my problem so I am fine, but I still refuse to accept on any level that this was the right way to structure things.