Okay, I think I am the source of this issue and I am trying to work my way back out of it. In the process of moving to a new machine, I have managed to get Dendron to kick out errors stating that there are no vaults to be found both on the old machine and the new.
I installed vscode and Deondron, then cloned my repo onto the new system. All files were there as expected, but no tree view or search option.
The original .workspace files were kept outside the repo. I tried pulling them from the google drive folder where I kept them and somehow in the process ended up with some changes that sent the same error (no vaults found) to my original workspace/machine.
I'm feeling a bit stuck now with a very full vault that isn't functional anywhere. Not sure how to proceed.