I figured out what was causing the issue thanks to using two troubleshooting commands:
DEBUG_PROPAGATE_EXCEPTIONS = True
which helped me identify that the issue was related to a path in my staticfiles
and
python manage.py findstatic --verbosity 2 “[foo]”
which helped me isolate the specific path and file triggering this issue.
Adding the missing css file resolved the issue, and I could load the website without having to set DEBUG as True - which seemed to either ignore or resolve the error automatically(This is discouraged from a security standpoint for production sites).