I worked through creating a staging site, the error didn’t replicate (everything was “fine”). I continued to work on the live site knowing I could deploy the staged site anytime. Leaving caching plugin disabled and I then reworked the usual troubleshooting. Which I was able to get top bar, identity, and menu working but still have the admin bar displaying as a long list vertically.
Inspecting the page, I found admin bar and another ccs file with reference to “pagespeed” throwing 404. So server side I disabled and removed the mod_pagespeed module and we’re back to “normal” besides having to reconfigure caching, ccss, etc, etc, again for performance metrics.
Hoisting a beer in hopes this helps another novice like me in avoiding ridiculous # of hours in troubleshooting.