OMG yes! thank you George. So after a LOT of fiddling around and thanks to your info regarding having 2 actual db connections I managed to get some queries going.
I do feel this took up waaaay to much time, which is by no means meant as offensive. Having a complete write-up for using Wappler with a remote managed db on digitalocean seems like a must to me, if that is a route anyone wants to take 
So the two things that helped me out were:
- checking and fixing database connection settings in globals in server actions.
- changing SSL from custom with certificate to default. With the custom option pointing towards the certificate I got the self signed certificate error in the console on the front end.
Thanks again George (and everyone else posting here on this forum with their questions and solutions!) Now it’s time to make up some lost time 