Pihole admin page 403

I dont see anything wrong.
You could try run my stat command and check if maybe one of the files/folders in the subfolders lack proper permissions/ownership ^^^

What error(s) is/are displayed when tailing the logs live while accessing the webGUI?

sudo tail -F /var/log/lighttpd/{access,error}-pihole.log

You could also try a fresh start:

Nothing wrong with that:

$ ps -o uid,user,gid,group,pid,cmd -C lighttpd
  UID USER       GID GROUP      PID CMD
   33 www-data    33 www-data  2609 /usr/sbin/lighttpd -D -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf