long story short i ended up making a fresh Trixie install, which took 1-2h total, after spending a good 6h trying to figure that out... with dependency hell on a systemd-resolved that was _not_ installed in what appeared to have been a badly updated (!) system....

lessons learned: i think i dislike systemd even more now, and will stick to devuan on my main machine.... debian still r0x though.

thanks to everyone to weighed in with support and insightful suggestions!

#debian