I was working with @Saad_Mujeeb via Anydesk to remote in and check his server. It appears google doesn’t install sendmail (apt package) by default in their images, even after installing that and configuring it, the connection isn’t happening.
I think the node_modules thing was just a side error, for whatever reason Strapi is trying to contact the local sendmail package and it’s just timing out. Strapi sits there waiting and Nginx doesn’t get a response.