Profile Directory in Wordpress
Ah, that moment when you bump into a question you figured out but I forgot I even posted it here.

There may be other methods but you should use the native CiviCRM profile link which you can find at Administer > Profiles > more > Use- Listings Mode. This looks like: https://example.org/civicrm/?page=CiviCRM..." format or whatever you set your base page at.

The issue seems to be if you try and use a shortcode for this directory style listing and not use the CiviCRM base page. So, you can create a clean URL to redirect to the native CiviCRM profile link. Perhaps this is considered a workaround but it works :)