I went to render an ~8min video and it showed it would take an hour which it shouldn't on my hardware(i3 8130u/UHD620). Watching the video after rendering explained why, there was about half an hour of black nothingness following the actual video part of the video, but there were no clips in the timeline indicating anything more than the 8min of video I wanted. I didn't have a problem before the 19.x update so I thought it might be a bug with the new version, but looking around shows no one else having the same issue I'm having thus me posting for help here. I have tried setting everything in the settings to default with no success. I feel like I'm over looking something stupid.

Yes, there are similar reports about that. But we never found really the root cause. Do you are on Windows or on Linux?
Make a backup of your project file and try with the daily build. Be aware that the new file saved with the daily build is not backwards compatible anymore (20.08.0 and newer).