Hey Francis,
Appreciate the reply. I know I did a lot of things that shouldn’t be the norm, but such is the nature of trying to fix your own problems lol
I initially fixed the issue literally minutes before seeing your reply by doing sudo chown -R root:root /etc/caddy/ then doing sudo chmod 755 /etc/caddy from this thread from 2019 Permissions of Caddyfile - #2 by Whitestrake
Note: I beleive my error came from initially only doing chown -R root <filepath> as opposed to root:root. Just linux noob problems
I corrected the ownership to the caddy user according to your instructions and I can confirm it works as it should now.
Thank you for your help!