Carly, please provide source for your floors, exactly what I’m looking for. Also thank you for post and thank you too other posters. I had just had floors done by a floor shop, two years of hospice requires me to redo them, seems a layer can be scraped up with a spackle scraper easily and turned dark ( like cherry wood does in sunlight but this was white oak ). So due to budget going to have to give this a go on my own. These posts priceless. After seeing this post and refinishing parents floor, I want your oak in my house … you did fantastic job.

We had our 2 1/2" top-nailed red oak floors refinished with some kind of water-based Bona Natural seal...no stain...almost 2 years ago. The nails are visible in the existing floor, which were sanded enough to remove the stain; nails are not as visible on the matching floor we had them install in the rooms that had previously been carpet. I thought the nail visibility had more to do with how much floor was sanded down to remove the pre-existing stain. Nothing is rusty.

We didn't move in yet so I cannot comment on it 🤷. You might want to do some reading regarding matt finish. Some people complain that is hard to live with finish, because for example foot marks while walking barefoot. I think they are some discussions on houzz regarding that

Does your floor manufacturer make a matching stair cladding? If you do that, you don’t need to have oak treads. Another option is to do a beautiful contrasting color of stain on the stairs. You could pull the colors together with handrail or baluster or post colors. Adding a runner on the stairs, or painting the risers would give you more options to tie in the floor colors. If you really want to match wood, dark stain is worth a try, but lighter colors are really tough. I matched a red oak transition strip to a dark chocolate brown stone tile once. I had to keep mixing and adding stain. It worked only because it was a dark brown color. It’s hard to neutralize red and yellow tones.