I tried a lot of the above, including the official Strapi render templates.
The clean template deploys properly, but somehow as soon as I update the template to v4.2.2 and add some models the render deploy breaks. Really can’t put my finger on it.
Switching to Railway.app literally solved all my problems in minutes. No code changes.
Also, it’s promising to be cheaper than Render. So that’s a bonus. And Render had a history of random outages in the Frankfurt region that weren’t logged properly in the status dashboard. Incident reports were missing or said services were down for a few minutes, when it was hours instead. So maybe the Render problems are a sign to abandon and move. I’m kinda sad to be leaving Render, I loved being able to choose which region my data lives in.