Totally fair — let me clarify a bit.

The root issue seems to stem from how Jekyll resolves file system deltas during its incremental rebuild cycle. When it detects changes, it re-evaluates its asset manifest, and sometimes if your style.css isn’t explicitly locked into the precompiled asset flow, Jekyll will fall back to its inferred default — in this case, normalize.css.

One common workaround is to abstract your custom styles into a partial (e.g., _custom.scss) and then import that into a master stylesheet that’s definitely tracked by Jekyll’s pipeline. Alternatively, some folks set a manual passthrough override in _config.yml to ensure asset pathing stays deterministic during rebuilds. You might also try placing your custom style.css outside the default watch scope and reference it via a canonical link to bypass the regeneration logic entirely.

Let me know if that helps at all — happy to fine-tune based on your setup.