Upgrade to 17.2 from 15.3 breaks 'path' output?

Hello,
Tonight I upgraded from 15.3 to 17.2 and now some of my pages are gone. I do not include a weight or front matter in these pages because I don’t want them included in the paginated list of articles in the blog. However, they used to appear in the site by path when I would set the ‘path’ variable in the front matter. Now I’m getting a ‘doesn’t exist’ error for them.

In the zola ouput, I get Warning: 2 page(s) ignored (missing date or weight in a sorted section):. This didn’t used to happen.

How do I fix it?

Move them out of the sorted section

Ah that makes sense. Except I’m using the zerm theme and I seem to have an _index sorting the top level content folder, and it breaks stuff off I turn off sorting in there.