Wow, just as I had given up on Strapi, the solution appears. All that was needed was just `heroku config:set NODE_ENV=production` - though this hardly is saving grace for me to go back to using it for my main products, in fact it again demonstrates the reasons I'm dropping it for my main products (but can continue to use for side projects) - it depended on a Strapi engineer's goodwill to answer your question in a forum, with no certainty that he will ever do so (because Strapi is free). And it was such a small thing and error in their docs that it made a whole bunch of devs on Stack Overflow run in circles around the conflict in sqlite in local env vs pg in prod env. Too new, not quite as stable for noobs like me, and lottery-based support simply won't work for me...(yet)