Okay, so that worked. I no longer see the errors in the logs nor in the GUI crashing when navigating to the list(s) settings and I even see [] prototype as a checkbox (unchecked) under Setting -> Archiving -> Active archivers unlike previous iterations.
I then took it an obvious step further and re-enabled hyperkitty and restarted Mailman and sure enough the logs look good, the GUI looks proper and the Active archivers now have 2 checkboxes [x]hyperkitty (checked) and []prototype (unchecked) for my test lists.
<some time passes>
I seem to have archives working on posts now, however, during my troubleshooting I moved away some archives/hyperkitty/spool/*.pck files and was wondering if/when I put them back is there a django-admin/hyperkitty command to run and process those again? (and if not I'm pretty confident the next post to any list? would slurp them all into hyperkitty anyway?)