Guest folder missing in 'users' folder, really strange. Help???

Hi, I'm having a very odd situation happening with my MacBook Pro. It's a 15" running OSX Sierra, and it's exhibiting strange behavior.

If I go onto my MacBook Air (my other computer, which is running High Sierra, it's a 2017 13" model) and navigate to Macintosh HD > Users, I can see three folders, Guest, Shared, and my Home folder. My Guest folder contains "Desktop", "Documents", "Downloads", "Library", "Movies", "Music", "Pictures", all of which I can't open, and my "Public" folder.

If I go onto my MacBook Pro, and navigate to Macintosh HD > Users, I see several folders. There's 'Deleted Users', 'Shared', and my Home folder. My 'Guest' folder, which is supposed to have the 'public' folder inside of it, is seemingly missing. If I do a search for it, it's gone. I'm not sure what happened to it or why it is gone. I tried making a guest folder in there manually, ie doing File > New Folder and typing in my username and password and then naming the new folder 'Guest', but that did nothing except make the new folder, and if I use it as a shared folder through system preferences I can't take anything out of it on my other computer that supposedly has read and write access to it.

I also tried these instructions to fix the shared folder if it was missing, thinking it would help the problem.

"If the Shared folder does not exist:

The following steps will recreate the Shared folder with the correct permissions if it is missing.

1. Open Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities).
2. Type the following:
   sudo mkdir -p /Users/Shared/
3. Press Return.
4. Enter your administrator account password when prompted, then press Return.
5. Type the following:
   sudo chmod 1777 /Users/Shared
6. Press Return.
7. Quit Terminal."

However, after doing this, the only thing it did was make my Finder extremely wonky, as in all of my folders in my sidebar disappeared and so did the default favorites (aka Desktop, Applications, etc), and if I tried to reenable them through Finder's Sidebar preferences the re-enabling wouldn't stick. This issue only disappeared after I restarted my machine.

Some backstory: I went to the Genius Bar with my MacBook Pro about a week ago or so to look at some battery issues and found out that not only was my battery failing, but so was my hard drive. So, I backed up my hard drive to a 4 TB external drive and purchased a new 1 TB hard drive and a new battery from Other World Computing, waited for them to arrive, and completed the repair myself at home. The repair went fine. No issues. I then spoke to Apple on the phone to guide me through the hard drive setup process and how to reformat the hard drive, re-install the OSX, ect. That all went without a hitch, and after the restore was over I updated my machine to High Sierra. THAT time, my guest folder was there and working great, I could use the public folder to share between the Pro and the Air with no issue.

Happy with my restore, I restarted my Mac in recovery mode and turned off SIP so I could use CandyBar to change a few app icons and to get ExtraFinder to work, and it was while in 'off SIP' mode that some of the icon changing went a little awry. Some of the system icons I changed refused to change back to their default state (I.E. what comes with Sierra), despite me exiting out of Candy Bar, replacing the resources folder in CoreServices with a backup of the original resources folder, and restarting the MacBook with SIP enabled. All of this is happening while that 4 TB external drive is NOT plugged in.

So, I panicked a little and basically started my MacBook up again in Recovery mode and wiped the internal hard drive completely using 'Erase' in the Utilities Disk Utility, and after that I reinstalled High Sierra through the recovery mode install method, and THEN I restored yet again from the same backup (on my 4 TB external) I restored from the first time. That time I did the full recovery and process my MacBook pro was running slower than molasses so I decided to go through the process one more time (erase, reinstall, restore from TimeMachine). This is where my computer is sitting at the moment. After the third restore, currently running OSX Sierra, not updated to High Sierra at all, and with a missing guest folder. What gives and how can I get it back?

I tried looking through system preferences a bunch and navigated to the users and groups section, found that a guest account was there and activated, I also activated file sharing for it. But, the guest folder in the users section in the Finder is still missing. Like, it's just gone. What should I do? To clarify, I also have slightly older backups that I can restore to (where I won't lose any files) if this is what is needed.

Thank you in advance for your help, I can provide screenshots if needed.