GVFS not supporting schemes other than file:///

Question

This is what I believe to be the root of a much larger problem with my install of GVFS. I'm running XFCE4 on Linux Mint 20.04, and from day 1 have not been able to use GVFS functions in any file manager. I can't use trash, I can't access SFTP servers or anything that requires GVFS. Trying to open the trash on Thunar displays

Failed to open 'trash:///' Operation not supported.

Similar messages appear on other file managers, usually with 'Operation not supported.'

When going into preferences, Thunar displays

It looks like gvfs is not available

Upon actually digging in the Thunar source code, I found that what it is actually doing here is testing the get_supported_uri_schemes function for common things like trash and sftp, and saying 'gvfs is not available' if those don't show as supported. I tested this myself with the below code snippet (taken from the Thunar source), and the only supported scheme returned by the function is file. I can confirm this by typing paths into the Thunar top-bar; it complains when anything except file:/// is entered.

const gchar * const *supported_schemes;
gboolean             supported = FALSE;
guint                n;
GVfs                *gvfs;

gvfs = g_vfs_get_default ();
supported_schemes = g_vfs_get_supported_uri_schemes (gvfs);

if (supported_schemes == NULL)
    return FALSE;

for (n = 0; !supported && supported_schemes[n] != NULL; ++n)
    if (g_strcmp0 (supported_schemes[n], "trash") == 0)
    supported = TRUE;

return supported;

Upon even further digging into old forum posts, it seems that on a working machine, the gvfs daemon is supposed to be started automatically by Nautilus, Thunar or any other file manager that requests it (not sure how that works). This doesn't happen on my machine, for a reason I've yet to determine. I am able to start the service manually using systemctl --user start gvfs-daemon, but this process running doesn't change the output of get_supported_uri_schemes.

Things I've Tried (that didn't work)

1. Reinstalling glib, gvfs (and every listed dependency for gvfs package)
2. Installing gvfs-backends, gvfs-common etc.
3. Adding exec dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session xfce4-session to my .xinitrc (as per this old post)
4. Manually starting gvfs-daemon using systemctl
5. Running the entire session as root (startx from root terminal), the same problem there

Can anyone point me in the vague direction of what might be wrong with gvfs here? Why doesn't it register as supporting anything other than file:///? Why doesn't the daemon start automatically with the file managers?

I appreciate any help anyone can render here, please comment if more information is required.