The old instance had its own problems (mainly pictrs not working) but its mainly because I was the only active sysadmin on this new instance. The old one had multiple and while I had some help from db0 and a few others, I was still essentially the only person maintaining it.
It was just a file permissions issue on my end after switching to Ansible, ran
chmod -R a=rwx
where pictrs was located. (This probably won’t help with db0.)