Just quick update for anyone that is in my shoes.
Unfortunately I still couldn’t get into contact with any staff members. I was searching through old threads and found that you usually can’t post on a new account until you login through the launcher or link your GitHub.
I’m not sure when these rules were implemented, but my guess is that since my account is rather old and since I never actually posted anything (0 posts since signing up in 2018), these rules might have applied to my account in the back end even though I didn’t see a message in the front end. Whenever the rules were put in place, old accounts with 0 posts likely got restricted without even knowing. The other likely outcome is that the rules were indeed put into place before 2018 and the message simply disappeared from my screen after 2 years of no activity on the account.
Anyways, I ended up linking my GitHub and also adding 2-Factor (just in case). As soon as I linked GitHub, I could post and was no longer in the queue. 