Well, I figured it out. A little bit of process of elimination but hey, it's happier.
I tried upping the memory limit for PHP to 512 mb based on this article (yes, I know it calls for 256 mb). FAQ - Pi-hole documentation
Well, that didn't help. I started seeing posts about database locks. Well, being newer to Linux and knowing this was working after my initial install, I just give the resolution in this community post from 2020 a try. This resolve the issue. So, the fix was...
sudo service pihole-FTL stop
mv /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.db /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL-old.db
sudo service pihole-FTL start
Issue resolved. 