Question about higher difficulty glitch

[nrs1nrs1]

Hi! I recently started my Survivor plus playthrough of the game from an easy cleared save using the exploit where you go to chapter select on NG+ and replay Hometown on whatever real difficulty you want to bypass the unlock requirements. I'm currently at around the Outskirts and I checked my backpack for the first time and I noticed I had retained none of the upgrades I had given Joel on my previous playthrough. I have made sure that my save file is NG+, and the difficulty is on the one I'm aiming to complete (Survivor). I'm glad I caught this early, is this the result of saving the NG+ file improperly? Someone with the knowledge please help, I'm pretty lost

 

edit: I think I figured it out, false alarm!

Edited June 21, 2020 by nrs1nrs1