Serialization issue with ScriptableObject

Hello, I've been having a serialization issue using scriptableobjects and nested lists of serializable objects. This is nothing new but the previous question hasn't really helped me.

Basically, I have a wrapper scriptable object with the following attributes in it:

 public class PropChunkContainer : ScriptableObject
 {
     public PropChunkData data;
     public string chunkName;
     public float weight;
 }

Where PropChunkData is a class marked as [Serializable] and it contains a bunch of primitives, mostly floats and some strings. More notably it contains a list of itself like the following:

 [Serializable]
 public class PropChunkData
 {
     public string propName { get; set;}
     public float positionX { get; set; }
     public float positionY { get; set; }
     public float positionZ { get; set; }
     ...
     public List<PropChunkData> children;
 }

I then have an editor script which is supposed to save/load these items, and the error occurs after a restart which is why I believe it's a problem with serialization. If I save and load, it works exactly as it should and all the PropChunkData objects have their correct values. However if I save and restart the Unity editor, then these values are lost. So upon trying to load, the chunkName and weight from PropChunkContainer will deserialize correctly and I can read them, but all the PropChunkData objects will be filled by zeroes and empty strings.

The following is the code I have been using to save objects:

 PropChunkContainer dataContainer = ScriptableObject.CreateInstance<PropChunkContainer>();
 dataContainer.Initialize(data, chunkName, weight);
 AssetDatabase.CreateAsset(dataContainer, propChunkDirectory + chunkName + ".asset");
 EditorUtility.SetDirty(dataContainer);
 AssetDatabase.SaveAssets();
 AssetDatabase.Refresh();

And this code to load (the weird code because LoadAssetAtPath did not work for some reason, so I loaded all and looped over all of them instead):

 Object[] assets = AssetDatabase.LoadAllAssetsAtPath(targetPath);
 for (int i = 0; i < assets.Length; i++)
 {
     if (assets[i].GetType() == typeof(PropChunkContainer))
     {
         PropChunkContainer container = (PropChunkContainer)assets[i];
         if (container != null)
         {
             LoadContainerIntoScene(container);
         }
         break;
     }
 }

Thanks for reading, I sure hope someone can help me with this.