My microphone suddenly started being recognized as an output sound device and I can't get it back. How do I fix this?

I have a Windows 11 home, Dell laptop Inspiron 15 3520. haven't called from my computer in a good 4-5 months, and when I tried recently my friends told me that the sound was bad, to which I checked which microphone was in use(I have a specialized microphone, a microphone built into the headphones, and the microphone built into the computer), I couldn't find the specialized microphone. I know it previously worked because of the calling and other projects for school where I recorded myself using the microphone.

I checked settings and the microphone(which shouldn't, to my knowledge, have an output feature--and also I tried "testing output" and nothing happened) was in the output section, no where to be seen in the input.

I searched up common issues and solutions, such as going to device manager and uninstalling the device, restarting the computer, and re-plugging the device(didn't work), and it was suggested maybe the port(3.5mm jack) was the issue, so I bought an adapter to plug into a usb-a slot and still only came up as an output. Then I tried reinstalling the RealTek driver but couldn't find any RealTek drivers available.

My only guess as to the cause of this is a previous Windows update(as there have been quite a lot in the past few months) deleted a required driver, but now I can't even find the driver needed. I'm also struggling to find previous updates/drivers.