Backfiring and 3 plugs carbonized after coil/plug replacement

Did as best I could with the title. It’s been a bit of an Odysee, so I’ll describe as much as I can.
‘01 3.4 v6 4x4, 265k miles.
a few days ago my CEL came on, flashing. I limped the remaining 10 miles to my friend’s im staying at in a smallish mountain town.

Neighbor and sometime/retired mechanic was coming over to the farm anyways to work on other things, and brought is OBD and offered to help.

Code read misfire on 2/3. Went into town to get coils, wires and plugs.

On pulling the plugs, I found cyl. 2 had lost its electrode entirely. neighbor guy seemed to have fixed other vehicles on the farm without them busting into flames, and on recommendation of my friend, I left him to replace coils and stuff, as I was barely able to stay awake. So I didn’t see what if anything he did wrong.
I decided I wanted to scope around and look for the electrode and do a compression test.
Fast forward to when I start up the truck the next morning to move it out of the rain and into the barn to work on. It’s running rough and has little power, and CEL is still on.
Out comes cyl. 2 plug, which is not seemingly too loose, and fairly covered in carbon.
Nothing weird on the scope, cylinder inside is surprisingly shiny.
Put the plug back in and check others.
here’s first thing that stumps me. All the plugs on the passenger side, with the coils on them, are very carbonized. these are the new ones that have driven 500 feet.
all the plugs on the driver side look new and shiny.

I put everything back, as best guess as I can to torque spec without an actual torque wrench. Start up the truck, seems off that’s before- hard to put it in words, but lower pitched and slower. I am used to an around 1k or 1.1k idle, it’s at about 800 ish. Rougher maybe, but it’s slight. There’s also a noticeable gas smell in the exhaust. I take it for 1/4 drive down the ride and it’s very sluggish and backfiring (not big bangs, but definitely some sort of misfire) with low power. I could barely get up the small incline back into the barn.
Come back, plugs are still carbonized on one side, and clean on the other. Checked, they’re the correct coils (at least for unbranded autozone ones). To test, I put the old coils on. The truck seems to start up more eagerly, and has maybe slightly more power, but still ‘backfires’ (still not ‘bangs’ but more like ‘poofs’). CEL is on but not flashing. I’m attaching a bunch of photos, I can’t figure out why plugs on one side would be carbonizing.

 

You really should keep all these posts in the same thread rather than creating new threads every time, so we can all read about what has been done so far.

If you changed the wires I'd check your firing order and make sure that you have the coils installed properly. Aftermarket wires aren't always the right length, so you can't go by length to guide you on which cylinder to install them in. You wouldn't be the first to get it wrong.

 

Sounds like I'd stick to the original coils and return the parts store ones. Wait until you can get some Denso ones. The missing electrode was likely the original cause of the misfires. So getting back as close as of a configuration as you can to that would be good. So maybe as @Kiloyard mentioned, check the new wires, or go back to the original ones.

 

Sorry about that. Will do in the future. I’ll check the order.