Laravel troubleshooting mystery

our 'Laravel Quick Fix & Consultation' app has been acting a bit... opinionated lately, doing some routine laravel troubleshooting and this one query, which should totally return data, just comes up empty. here's what the console output looks like; any laravel development gurus seen this particular ghost in the machine?

php artisan tinker
>>> App\Models\Product::where('status', 'active')->get();
=> Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#4321
     all: [],
   }
>>> App\Models\Product::count();
=> 15

hoping for sum expert insights!