The issue I ended up running in to was with mounting /dev/disk/by-state (again), fix is simple enough. Backporting the balenaOS changes to the initrdscripts files (found here) as well as the os-helpers (found here) was what did it for me. It seems these fix the boot process when partition uuid is not used in booting the kernel (I pass the label as boot param)
openBalena works fine once I have the device working on balenaOS v2.49 and configured correctly. I configured it as a generic-aarch64 device-type and had it join an app configured w/that type, and it seems to work as expected. The /etc/hosts/ file had to be configured to add the local openBalena instance, and once that was done the device could be added to an openBalena app using balena join.