i went ahead and tried to re-attach the rigidbody to the camera and see if interpolate would solve the similar issues with having the camera act as a physics object, but strangely enough, it didn't solve much. the "look at" still causes jitter, even when the player and the camera's rigidbodies have their positions interpolated.

having a rigidbody on the camera isn't exactly that clean anyways, so i could take the route of using a cool shader to clip objects that the camera sits inside of, or i could just use a raycast the way that it's probably meant to be done. but for now, best to move onto some new complicated features.