Before minify and fingerprint was not called resulting in the stylesheet been css/styles.css, it was not minified, not compressed, and not fingerprinted.
referencing the issue #7567 from hugo source for future me. There seemed to be a problem with deleted html tokens from hugo_stats.json while using minify.
Before minify and fingerprint was not called resulting in the stylesheet been css/styles.css, it was not minified, not compressed, and not fingerprinted.