I have an empty zero-KB folder that has been reappearing in my Mac Trash every few days via iCloud sync since 2022 on macOS Sequoia, MacBook Air, iCloud+ 2TB. Apple Support spent nearly a year on this with me previously without resolution.
Through diagnostics I have confirmed the folder shows in Finder with an iCloud sync icon but Terminal cannot locate it even with Full Disk Access enabled. A full brctl dump across 156,000 lines shows zero local record of it and mdfind and Spotlight return nothing. Deleting from Mac Trash, iCloud.com Recently Deleted, and iPhone Recently Deleted simultaneously does not fix it. When I renamed it the rename synced to all devices, but Apple's server eventually renamed it back to the original name on its own. iCloud.com throws an explicit server error when trying to permanently delete it saying "There was a problem deleting [name]. Try deleting the folder again later."
The brctl dump and the iCloud.com deletion error together tell me this is an orphaned CloudKit record on Apple's backend that their own deletion infrastructure cannot process. Has anyone successfully gotten Apple engineering to do a server-side cleanup for something like this, or does anyone know how to extract the CloudKit record ID from the client side to give engineering a precise location?