sigh I really should not work on things when it is after midnight and I have had a long day.
After my patient and understanding friend Teo posted above, I went back and re-looked at my initial attempt at the query based option that I had used in the past. It appears that I had incorrectly setup the query with a condition for the user email to equal the security provider identity instead of the user id. Once corrected, everything works as expected.
I think what threw me off initially was the change in wording. In the past php project, I had used the condition hasitems, but in the nodejs project, the condition is hasValue.
As always, I appreciate the help and support as I learn this new and exciting aspect of Wappler. 
However, if using sessions is a better approach to it, I would be interested in learning more about it.