@stingjay you clearly did not read the message that is on top of every single page of this forum:
Please do not post a support request without first reading and following the advice in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

We have good docs here: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/

I am really amazed with how easily we can set a retrogaming machine on a cheap board and completely with a free software.

I built the latest ES from source and it still saves just fine on roms that are scraped and roms with no metadata entered. I also would have noticed this problem when doing my initial tests for my long exit time fix.