Mapped Grave to Escape, Can't Map Escape to Grave/Tilde

[mtk]

fedora 40 plasma 6 wayland 1.22 (oh the pain after using X10/X11 for the last 36 years). I want to swap the physical Escape and grave/tilde keys. I successfully mapped grave/tilde to escape, but attempts to map the physical escape key seem to be completely ignored (can't input it into input-remapper).
im.log
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1. % input-remapper-control --version
   input-remapper 2.0.1 https://github.com/sezanzeb/input-remapper
   python-evdev 1.6.1
2. i have successfully remapped grave/tilde to escape. evtest says grave is escape for the device 'input-remapper keyboard'. but it does not log any event when pressing the physical Escape key. instead it only echoes ^[. for the device ' AT Translated Set 2 keyboard' (this is a thinkpad laptop) it echoes ^[ for both the physical Escape key and the physical grave/tilde key. for the device 'input-remapper AT Translated Set 2 keyboard forwarded', it logs an event for Escape for both the physical Escape key and the physical grave/tilde key.
3. the log is attached. the TL;DR - when pressing the physical Escape key while trying to record, no log records are written under '-d'.