Thank you for your replies.
9V battery on Elegoo power supply module, jumped on 5V pins (not 3.3). As for your code question - the code is 99.9% the same in IDE vs Cloud, only difference being the Cloud-specific and required changes such as #include "thingProperties.h" and declaring the ctr in Cloud > Setup tab versus before Void Setup in IDE. When I upload each version, and use 100% exact same hardware, circuit, everything (literally the same not a duplicate setup on other hardware) only the IDE one runs. Hardware and circuit are the same, Nano unit is the same, only diff is one code base from IDE, one from Cloud. This leads me to believe it is something in code or the Cloud version itself, but no idea what??
Also, I have many other IoT sketches running fine on same hardware (just no LCD) and it all works.