I think the issue is that they tried to separate the input into a list of tokens, like ["5", "nine"], and work from there, which doesn't work on something like "oneight".
I didn't have that issue at all; I just looped through the 20 different tokens and found first and last instances of all of them, and compared the very first and very last of all instances.
https://github.com/xdavidliu/advent-of-code/blob/main/2023/d...