Any insight was to why, however, my bitcoin-cli commands no longer appear working?
Check your bitcoin.conf:
1) It should have server=1
2) Remove rpclogin and rpcpassword if you have that, and try again. I expect bitcoin-cli relies on the cookie file after that has been introduced. rpclog/pass block that.
Since you are running your node manually, consider using bitcoin-qt with disablewallet=1, that gives you a tab to run rpc commands from the GUI.