t3 tutorial - chirp project has problems w google auth via Clerk?

Hi guys! I recently went through theo's official T3 tutorial. However, one way i deviated from what he did was I also allowed Google auth via Clerk (not just GitHub). TLDR a user who signed up my chirp site using google instead of GitHub isn't given a username value for the object representing them in the Clerk client? i.e., author.username is null even though e.g., they're profile pic is registered (author.profileImageUrl contains a url to their social account pic)? --- problem: a friend today tried to use the website. he: 1. signed up and in via his google account 2. made a post and that has screwed the .getAll procedure for the posts router. The specific error thrown is the tRPC error is here in pic 1: "Author not found for post". I can verify that my friend is a User via the Clerk Dashboard. i can also see that posts he made via npx prisma studio. the author_id in his post and the user_id for his Clerk profile matches up. i.e., the posts were made. --- Looking at theo's GH repo for the project, there was a recent merge where basically the case is handled for when the author.username is null/undefined. the key bit is in the filterUserforClient helper function. it gives the author object an externalUsername property by assigning: user.externalAccounts[0]?.username i.e., the username provided by the User object's externalAccount(s), if they have one. despite doing this, the object associated with my friend's profile has null for the newly set .externalUsername property. so, again, the TLDR: my friend who signed up on my chirp site using google instead of GitHub isn't given a username value for the object representing them in the Clerk client? just to check that was the cause of the issue, I set the externalUsername to "username-less" and now the Feed component can get all the posts. see pic 2. --- question: has anyone experienced something similar? is there a good way around this?