Quarto seemingly not executing .qmd files in file directory

[jake-wittman]

Hello!

I'm attempting to re-build a distill blog in Rmarkdown to quarto. I'm running into an issue where quarto seems to not be respecting the execute-dir: file setting I have in my _quarto.yml file. I did a search for 'execute-dir' in this discussion page and it seems other people have also run into this issue in the past, but supposedly it was resolved with newer versions of quarto which, as of my writing, are now older versions of quarto than what I have installed.
Edit: Here's a link to one such discussion: #706

Each blog post has its own sub-directory ('website/posts/yyyy-mm-dd-unique-slug/'). Within the post sub-directory, I have a directory for data. When I attempt to render the blog (or just the individual post) I get a message that

Error: 'F:/Documents/website/data/named-data.csv' does not exist.

this seems to tell me that the blog index.qmd file is not being rendered in its directory, but rather in the project directory, since the path to the data should read 'F:/Documents/website/posts/yyyy-mm-dd-unique-slug/data/named-data.csv'.

My _quarto.yml file looks like this:

project:
  type: website
  execute-dir: file
execute: 
  freeze: auto

If it's relevant, I basically am following the directions from Nick Tierney's post: https://www.njtierney.com/post/2022/04/11/rmd-to-qmd/
I'm not sure if there may be some post specific YAML that is overwriting the project YAML.

quarto::quarto_version() returns quarto 1.1.113 and I am using the Rstudio Daily build "Elsbeth Geranium" Daily (b4e96868, 2022-08-23) for Windows

Session info:
R version 4.0.3 (2020-10-10)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252 LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices datasets utils methods base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] Rcpp_1.0.9 here_1.0.1 ps_1.7.1 later_1.3.0 withr_2.5.0 digest_0.6.29
[7] rprojroot_2.0.3 R6_2.5.1 jsonlite_1.8.0 evaluate_0.16 cachem_1.0.6 rlang_1.0.4
[13] cli_3.3.0 renv_0.13.2 rstudioapi_0.14 rmarkdown_2.15 distill_1.4 tools_4.0.3
[19] glue_1.6.2 rsconnect_0.8.27 processx_3.7.0 xfun_0.32 yaml_2.3.5 fastmap_1.1.0
[25] compiler_4.0.3 memoise_2.0.1 htmltools_0.5.3 knitr_1.39 downlit_0.4.2 quarto_1.2

[jake-wittman]

I believe I found the issue. I was using here::here() in my read_csv() call. With a little more troubleshooting in a simpler post I found that getwd() returned the correct working directory for the blog post, but here::here() returned the project directory. Removing here::here() from the code fixed the issue.

I don't know enough about the intricacies of working directories and rendering and the here package to make sense of why this might happen. Is this expected behavior that I just don't understand?