My empty folder won't delete

I have a set of 4 folders, within each other, that i transferred from an external drive, that were created by someone else, that i cannot delete. They all appear empty. Here are the things ive tried:

• put in the trash and empty
• force delete
• check all the permissions on all the folders, they are all open, and all the folders are "unlocked"
• tried deleting from command line. Put the folders on the desktop, used rm, rm -R, rmdir, nothing works.
• When i use rm -R (folder), it starts asking me if i want to delete files that i cannot see in the folder. when i type "y" for delete, it says "operation is not permitted." this goes on for a while, lots of "files"
• i tried unhiding hidden folders in finder, which works (i can see other hidden files), but there are no hidden files in the directories.
• i tried deleting them in "safe mode"
• I tried target disk mode (disk sharing) in boot options, and deleting them from another mac, it doesnt work. When i copied the folders over to that mac (i was nervious i would then have this problem on 2 computers, but....) i was able to delete the folders on the new computer, no problem. I also tried just "moving" the folders, but they just copied and the system told me it could not delete the old ones.

When i try to delete from trash it says the folders are "in use" which is why i tried safe mode, but no good. I dont know how, but i think the computer thinks there are files in the folder that are not there anymore, like maybe there is a directory error or something. Also, there are 4 folders within each other, the root says it is 18kb, the next is 12kb, the 3rd is 6kb, then the last one says 0kb, which seems consistent with the size of nested empty folders?

Any help would be appreciated.

Macbook Pro M1 Max

Ventura 13.4.1