is equality for maps just checking the object reference, or is it seeing if they contain the same data

Structural equality: https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.collections/-abstract-map/equals.html

In Kotlin:

==

always check for structural equality calling

.equals()

method under the hood

===

always checks for referential equality This is more unified approach, then in Java

But of course you still need to look at what

.equals()

does!

Yeah works, the issue I was having was unrelated. Just worked since the key type was string and the value was a data class