and yeah, someone did a Holy War into the steppes and apparently I'm stuck with only him, with all other vassals leaving. I'm gonna revoke his governorship and tighten laws around war declarations in an older save

after digging through some forums, apparently that's a bug that can happen if one of your vassals wins a holy war for a kingdom tier realm

like when I played Unity and it was just 'the Assassins hacked your Netflix and force you to watch this movie about the French Revolution' and ended on a 'oh huh this was pretty pointless' I knew that Ubisoft were just keeping the meta narrative around as a cheap lure.