Output created by pagedown::html_paged not displaying properly

Question

I am working on a project in RStudio that takes in multiple rmd files and a yml file and uses the bookdown render_book() function to produce paginated output that can be converted to pdf.

The bookdown code is as follows:

bookdown::render_book("prog1.Rmd", "bookdown::gitbook",    config_file = config_yml)

bookdown::render_book("prog1.Rmd", "pagedown::html_paged", config_file = config_yml)

The config_yml file:

book_filename: "Report Output"
delete_merged_file: true
new_session: yes
rmd_files: ["Start.Rmd", "prog1.rmd", "appendix.rmd"]
output_dir: ./fakedir/
language:
  label:
    fig: "FIGURE "
    tab: "TABLE "
before_chapter_script: "./fakename.R"

The specifications from the Start.rmd:

---
title: "Report"
subtitle: "`r text`"
date: "`r datetext`"
site: bookdown::bookdown_site
classoption: oneside
documentclass: book
link-citations: yes
description: "My Report"
---

Historically this has caused no issues, with the first bookdown call creating an html doc and the second creating a paginated version. Recently, with no code changes, the paginated version will not open properly once created. It only shows the title page followed by two blank pages. I have thus far been unable to find a reason for this. I am hoping for either a solution to this issue or an alternative method to producing a paginated document. Let me know if more info/code is needed.