How I resolved the “You need to use a Theme.AppCompat theme (or descendant) with this activity” Issue

So I just created a new android project to play around with firebase tools (like firestore, functions, app distribution and whatnot), and I decided to reduce the pain of having to build the app and upload the app to Firebase App Distribution manually by <a href="https://premsuman.medium.com/android-debug-signed-release-builds-with-github-actions-4f3d08f8a6f5" rel="noopener">automating release pipelines through Github Actions</a>. All was going good, then came a nightmare. Although both the release and debug builds were working when built from Android studio, they were crashing on app launch, when built via github actions and downloaded via firebase app distribution, with this error: <a href="https://premsuman.medium.com/how-i-resolved-the-you-need-to-use-a-theme-appcompat-3ad8e24544e8">Learn More</a>