The screen is now displaying data.
Talk about a headache… my first thought was that some of the braided wire I was using had a couple of loose threads that were shorting somewhere.
I had also noticed that (while mounted in the box) if I pushed the motherboard in, at a point south of, and on the west side of the LCD, and held it there, that the screen would work. That tells me there is some kind of break/short in the connection somewhere and the flexing board is acting like a switch making/breaking connections as it moves.

I found a frayed wire, and replaced it with a solid core, but that didn’t make a difference.
Back to testing

I know its not the case, but it almost being screwed with or sabotaged… I can’t explain it… but somehow, despite being connected and soldered together, and working for hours and hours, the data coming from one of the the NodeMCU pins was no longer being received by the screen pin.
Data was going from the NodeMCU, along the connecting wire to the point where the other end of the wire was soldered to the screen pin. Data was hitting the solder on the wire connected to the screen pin… but had STOPPED transmitting through the solder to the screen pin itself.
Did physics change when I wasn’t looking, or something?

Regardless, after resoldering the screen started displaying data again… but seems to be crashing. I haven’t plugged it into the serial to verify what’s going on, but it looks like the NodeMCU is tripping the watchdog timer again… I get a quick splash screen, an attempt at posting data, and then my splash screen again… also, no data is hitting the spreadsheet right now. Now I get to fix something else that was just working perfectly but stopped when I didn’t do anything to it.

May or may not look into this today - am getting tired of slamming head against wall of “why did it stop workng this time”

Troubleshooting is fun, and all, but it shouldn’t be the only thing you ever end up doing … it gets in your head and makes you question your ability to design and build working things - My confidence is getting rattled hard here, between the spontaneous solder failure followed by the computer deciding it would rather reboot than run using the same code it was running a couple of days ago… code that worked perfectly 2 days ago now doesn’t.