Unable to set password of another user, even as root

I'm having an unusual problem. I created the user, and, I thought, set it's password. For additional context, this is in a production environment, and we are using RHEL 8.10

[root@computer ~] useradd user -G wheel
[root@computer ~] passwd user
New password:
BAD PASSWORD: blah blah
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully

All wheel users have the ability to SSH into this server. When I attempted to SSH into the server using the new credentials, I get "bad password" error. Okay, so I attempt to login into the machine directly using the tty, once again, bad password. I log back in as root, and attempt to reset the password, this time verifying that I am inputting the correct password. Once again I am denied logging in due to bad password. I then attempted to log in with my own user account, and got denied because bad password. This is very unusual, as I am able SSH into the server using my personal user with the same credentials that got denied. I'm stuck between this being a simple user error, or if there's Linux configuration options (specific to RHEL 8) that would prevent new passwords to be written. I thought that maybe / is mounted as read-only, but I'm able to touch new files to /etc. Addtionally, mount -l | grep "ro" does not list the root partition as read-only. Any ideas to check would be greatly appreciated. EDIT: I also just realized, if it was a read-only problem, the new user I created wouldn't have been registered. I verified the user was created and added to the correct group via cat /etc/passwd and cat /etc/group