Returned to debugging this this morning, but suddenly was unable to get it to print the error message any message. After a certain amount of fiddling, believing I did not understand how systemd services worked, I discovered that in fact at some point during the debugging I actually fixed the error, thus resulting in the error message no longer printing. Unfortunately I continued debugging after the point at which it started working and in the process I managed to break it again
For a different reason tho