I managed to solve this, so for future readers:
- I went to emergency and pressed back(this brought up the phone lock screen with the pattern option). Rebooting seems to also bring up the lock screen temporarily.
- I managed to enter the lock-screen pattern correctly from muscle memory(even though it didn't seem to work all the times I had tried before). I believe if you enter it incorrectly enough times, it'll let you enter your google account info to reset the password, but I never got to that point.
- After the phone unlocked I changed my default password and all seems good now.
I'm still not sure why google wouldn't let me set a temporary password. God help anyone that doesn't remember their original one.
