I have this working now, but I’m not completely sure why.
I reloaded the SD card from image to have a fresh starting point. And then I came across this thread:
Where towards the bottom Bucketman said he simply restarted the services and things started working, and things are now working. So there must be something going on with the way services load on first boot after applying the image. Simply rebooting after a fresh load will not fix it, you have to restart all services from CLI. The only other thing I did this time related to sound input/output was tweak levels in alsamixer, but that was done after things started working. Alsa is using PulseAudio for both input/output in case that is useful info.
It seems stable for the time being, I can even reboot now that the above has been done.
I will report back if anything unexpected happens.