After this manual update, the dnsmasq service is now starting automatically and the only thing pending was having pihole-FTL starting automatically on system reboot, which for some reason was not happening.
I had to run the following command after each reboot
sudo service pihole-FTL
I read on another post (lost link) that reinstalling pihole fixed the issue.
to uninstall
pihole uninstall
to install
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
Now pihole-FTL service starts automatically after system reboot.