Ok I am now realizing after more tests I actually read the docs correctly, and in that sense they're not ambiguous.

It's just that I tried to use data_files for something that it's not for: I did look at package_data first and I get that's what I SHOULD be using, however I want to add in a file that isn't in the package root in the original source folder. (package is in "./src", file I want to add in is in "./") package_data seems unable to do this, so I thought data_files would get me there, but apparently not in any reasonable way.

Closing this since I was apparently just surprised it didn't do what I want, and didn't actually misread anything as I thought I had