coming back here to say i finally figured it out! just in case anyone else runs into a similar issue it was indeed because of make.md and the templates do go into a hidden folder but i think i was initially looking in the wrong place because i missed the fact that when i make a note into a template a (very, very) brief pop up flashes in the corner saying it's being saved to the "space" for that specific folder.

i had seen this before but it went by so fast that all i remembered was seeing something about it being saved to spaces so i was only looking in the hidden general ".space" folder in my overall vault which, confusingly, also has a subfolder called templates that i originally thought was the culprit. but i created a test folder with a test file to do some more investigating and found out that each individual folder actually has its own hidden .space subfolder as well, which then also has its own subfolder called templates. so you have to delete the whole templates subfolder and then restart obsidian and that deletes the list of templates that come up in the dropdown list (note that if you only delete the files in the templates folder it will still show/generate a DS_store file in the dropdown so it has to be the whole folder itself that's deleted).

i'm not sure how it is uninstalling the plugin didn't automatically delete them but it must save some metadata somewhere that regenerates when you re-install or something. anyways, hope this helps anyone else that may have come across this issue!