having difficulty incorporating a GitHub project

Hi all! I’m hoping someone here could help me. (Please forgive any typos. I’m still recovering from eye surgery. I also had brain surgery last year, so sometimes I forget really obvious things, and that may be the case here. )

Brief backstory: I used to run a flash fiction site where people could spin for different elements for inspiration and wanted to start it back up again. I was previously using a JavaScript project I found on GitHub. It still works okay, and I can still use it, but it’s not responsive, and some people write these stories on their phones. I found one that I think will work better.

So I’ve done almost this exact thing before, but for some reason am not able to get this one to work, and I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.

Here’s what I’m trying to implement:

I’m happy to provide a link in the comments to my current /old site, but I’m trying this on a new one. (Old code works on the new site.) I use multisite. I’m trying this on a new, empty site. (I actually like my old – pretty old now – theme, but the comments stopped displaying, and I can’t figure out why, so I figured I would just start fresh with Gutenberg and the basic Twenty Twenty-Three for now.)

I’ve been using WP since 2005, but my coding experience beyond HTML is sadly pretty minimal. So I understand some but not a lot.

Steps:

I’ve downloaded the files and uploaded the js files to the js folder and the css file to the css folder. (I did create a new folder first because he just nameed it app.css, and that seemed so generic that it might cause future problems, so I put it in its own folder.)

I use a plugin to add header and footer content, so I added the ref links to the headers and the scripts to the footers.

Both codes use ULs, and I discovered from the previous code project that if I don’t use the classic editor block, it will not work and still just looks like an unordered list. So I’m using that again, but that’s the problem I’m running into. The lists don’t seem to be linking to the js or css. They’re just ULs.

I’ve double checked my URLs (was sure to add the wp-includes part) and triple checked for typos, and I think I have everything where it needs to be. I’ve tried individual rollers but have gone as far as copying almost the entire HTML page he has (most stuff between the body tags), but neither option works.

This *seems* like it should basically work the same at the other one, but I’m just at a loss as to what I’m doing wrong. I’m clearly missing something.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be really appreciated, as I’ve been trying for two days now and am just completely out of ideas. 🙁