What is VSCode telling me, here? Too many changes found but "no changes to commit" and none listed

Question

I was experiencing the Too Many Active Changes warning in VS code. (Still not sure why it was tracking images on my desktop even though it's supposed to be pointing to a folder elsewhere) I did get the warning this time when I opened VSCode but now I don't have the absurd list of changes. I have this.

Which tells me that "There are no changes to commit." but ALSO that "Too many changes have been detected, only the first 10000 will be shown below." like this. (you can see, below the yellow warning label, is where the list of changes usually appears)

I'm a student. I am not sure what I should be doing, here. (I've heard I should maybe move my local repository to a partition that isn't C. I've also heard of .gitignore but am struggling to find beginner info on what it is, how it works, etc...)