After too many hours of frustration spent not understanding what was happening, a random idea to test seems to have confirmed the issue, but no idea how to properly resolve, and I'm truly not certain if this is a wordpress, css or even a theme caused issue (Avada theme). So a quick explanation:
Wordpress, Avada theme. Everything updated and patched. There is a menu on the site. There is a basic white color for the text, and hovering over a menu item changes the text color to orange and adds a border to the top and bottom. Nothing crazy. Just a little "animation" by setting a base state for the menu items (text white, background transparent, no border), and setting some different parameters for when it's hovered/active. I actually set the options in the avada builder, but also confirmed what was being applied with chrome dev tools. While in the builder back end after setting this, it works flawlessly. Hovering a menu item triggers the transition and moving off returns it to original state. If I visit the page normally however, all the menu items are already displaying and stuck in their hover state. From first moment it's visible it's already like that, and all the menu items are the same as if they were all being hovered. Hovering, clicking etc doesn't change the state. It acts like the hover/active properties are always active. Even trying to force change the element state in chrome dev tools doesn't change anything. If I go back into the live edit mode (which is still rendering the site as well), it's functioning perfectly.
I couldn't find much of anything hunting the forums. But a lucky break....I noticed that all the links in the menu were of anchor link variety. The kind that has ...com/#xxxxx in the url where clicking on it scrolls to a section or part of the same page instead of taking you to a unique page. The site was set as a one page. Using the avada Wedding demo site as a starting point. So I tested replacing a menu item with an anchor link url with any other link without the #xxxxx . Suddenly, it works perfectly again. Any of the anchor link items will still be stuck in that hover state appearence, but any item not using an anchor link looks and works fine even when the menu is a mix of both.
So the dillema. The page is all on one page, so the menu items need to use the anchor style. I'm not certain why anchor link seems to be be stuck on hover/active. I had wondered if it's just technically always active by the way it works which would explain this. Any thoughts?
Menu items with anchor link urls don't change between regular or hover/active state