flat hitboxes rubbing against each other cause bumps and unexpected results

I am using floating pawn movement for my player pawn in a 2d platformer. The pawn uses a box collision with physics enabled as its root component. In my level, the pawn will move across a flat ground made up of a bunch of cube meshes, and somehow, the pawn’s vertical position will change when exclusively using input vectors on the horizontal axis. Additionally, often times, when holding a direction into a wall, the pawn will start to ascend. My pawn hitbox uses a physical material without restitution. I have fiddled and tinkered with all kinds of physics settings to try and fix this, to no avail.
bump example
The green/red box is not the hitbox, it’s a line trace being called every tick to check whether the pawn is grounded to allow the pawn to jump; the print statement is the pawn’s position in the world.
ascention example
Any help is greatly appreciated. thx <3