At some point I turned off detect track durations in the basic editor and switched to the advanced editor. The next time I tried to edit an existing release, the tracklist tab had "Artist Name (1:23)" in the artist column and no track times in the track time column despite the data coming from the database.

On the missing entities tab, it wanted to add n new artists with times in their name. When I went back to the tracklist tab, switched back to the basic editor and turned detect track durations back on, it went back to normal. However when I got to the edit note tab, it wanted to enter an edit medium edit to change the artist credits from the current artist credit to... the current artist credit.