package.json
Long story short, as best I can tell running the gatsby-cli update installed a newer dependency inside my repo, and there was the mismatch between gatsby-cli and react. Finally I side by side checked both pages in my fancy site vs a fresh install and aside from the gh-deploy script, the only difference I could find was that cli update in the dependencies
How to fix it? Delete that gatsby-cli line in the package.json, trash the node-modules folder and re-run yarn
Tentatively run gatsby develop… wait Error! WHAT!… Oh..
Something is on port 8000 already, go ahead and use a different one? Ya, I think I will