Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

Category page is loading preprocessed phtml files instead of theme files

For some reason, when I load template hints on my magento catalog page, the files that are being included are var/www/html/var/view_preprocessed/pub/static/vendor/magento/module etc, instead of var/www/html/app/design/frontend/theme/ etc… how would i change this and how did it get changed to begin with

It feels like my app is stuck in production mode, however ive run the command to set my magento 2 to developer, ive tried editing the env, set to developer, tried to set it in my pub/htacces, yet for some reason I still dont see my developer tab in stores/config and Its loading view_preprocessed files