Desktop and Downloads folders are not accessible via file sharing

I finally solved a problem I was having where viewing the Desktop and the Downloads folders via file sharing was not working. Specifically, my home directory contents would correctly show up, but if I drilled down to either Desktop or Downloads on the remote computer, the directories would show up as empty. Attempting any operation on the directories would fail. I could find nothing misconfigured on those dirs, and iCloud was disabled on the source computer. Eventually, I found that my user on the source computer had an AFPUserAliases entry set (found this via Directory Utility, which you can open from a button in Sharing). Once this was deleted, Desktop and Downloads were correctly served to the remote. I have no idea how the AFPUserAliases entry showed up -- it may have been the result of some long ago action in a prior version of MacOS on the source computer. Remote was running Ventura, source was running Monterey.