Maybe you can once remove everything in config/cache and see if you still get the errors. (I can suspect that is the config is cached incorrect that you keep some errors)

Else it should be interested to see more of your stacktrace to understand why this happen :)

Thanks for the suggestion! It was actually a permissions problem.

The console user didn't have read access to .env but it didn't throw an error at the time of reading.

I'm curious how you set permission on production, or standard practices. While learning, I'm setting mine as strict as possible, then loosening them each time I hit a problem - but it's wasted a lot of time on this occasion!

I restricted .env read access so that admins can't see APP_KEY DB_PASSWORD etc. I'll need to rethink my security strategy.

Original permissions:

0550 - directories
0440 - files
0400 - .env
0770 - bootstrap/cache/
0770 - database/
0770 - storage/
0660 - database/database.sqlite
0660 - storage/logs/laravel.log

I use the same user for the cli and web and make that user the owner of the files. With that I normally don't get any problem with the permissions.