Thanks for posting all this and digging around! It does seem strange yeah. Are you able to single out anything that could be different for the sprites where you get the error? Another thing, if it wouldn't be of too much hassle for you, could you try a newer version of GM just as a test? It's difficult keeping a tool like this error free as the .yy format is so damn specific, at times ever-changing and non-documented. :)
I really can't figure out what would be different. I've had a bunch of theories. Name length, texture groups, the color of the slice, but nothing has proven to consistently make a difference. But conversely it's also not pure random chance every export. Consistently, editing some sprites in my aseprite file trigger it and editing others don't.
One thing that makes it a bit harder to test is that from what I can tell, once the error is triggered once, it won't trigger again till I reload the project and do a new import.
If you haven't been testing the Long Term Stable (LTS) branches of GameMaker my hunch is that this error is to be expected as the LTS and regular GameMaker branches have diverged over time, and the weird anomaly is actually that I'm sometimes not getting this error message.
Just FYI LTS 2022.0.3 is the latest LTS version, released in November. The LTS version release numbers don't match the current year the way the regular GameMaker version numbers do https://gamemaker.io/en/blog/version-lts-r3
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Some further investigating. I just tested exporting a sprite that gets the error, and one that does not, with my project closed so that I can see exactly what GM Link is exporting before GameMaker throws the error and attempts to fix it. Checking Github desktops diff display for the sprite_name.yy files. What I've found:
The order that elements are listed is different making it difficult to tell if the exact same info is in both the old and new files. Eg. ""resourceType": "GMSprite"," is at line 2 in the old file and line 30 of the new one.
New file is two lines longer, but I can't figure out what exactly was added.
I can find some minor but probably important differences Eg. "resourceType":"GMSpriteFramesTrack" was changed to "$GMSpriteFramesTrack":""
Looking at the the yy file for the sprite that throws an error vs the one that doesn't, both have all the changes listed above, but the one that doesn't throw an error, inexplicably uses the earlier resource version numbers! So yeah the actual mystery here is why it doesn't always use the newer version numbers and throw the error since it's clearly sending stuff in the newer format in both cases.
Once I loaded GameMaker it went into both these yy files and cleaned them up so that the only changes are the various name and ID blocks. So just the stuff with long hex strings like: "b0cb57fe-e71b-4013-bdd3-37565da5b115"
So GameMaker does seem to be handling converting the files back to the LTS standard. It's still a bit worrying though. I generally think of the yy files as dark magic, so any time something strange happens involving them I get nervous.
Let me know if it would be useful to have these various yy files for comparison. It would be great if GM Link had the option to export LTS compliant files in the future, but I realize that may be too big of an ask!
I really appreciate all the info. It's invaluable in order to more easily solve problems like these. For sure, I understand that it's worrying, so it's great that you're using version control! I just released a game and work full-time, so I can't promise exactly when I'll get this one fixed, but I promise I'll be as quick as I possibly can. I never used LTS myself which might be the main culprit behind this in itself. I think I'll get that version you're using and see if I can find the issue. And yes, if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to look at the yy files as well. Please drop me a mail at prote1337@gmail.com. :)
I just released a new version, but the fix for this isn't included unfortunately. I tested GM Link with your aseprite file and the newest LTS version of GM and everything worked perfectly, so I wasn't able to reproduce it this time around. Hopefully we can come close to the root cause soon so it can be smashed. I'll continue pondering about what could be causing it.