It's very annoying how every now and then the Raspberry folk make some fundamental change - logging, networking, etc, and it's hard to find documentation on the new ways.
I don't use VNC to access my Pies (doesn't that imply a full desktop OS?), instead I use PiOS Lite and connect to a terminal over ssh.
It's always worked, though nowadays you do need to enable ssh in Pi Imager.
Bonus: without the desktop, apt update has very many less packages to modify.
I use a GUI on a computer whenever possible 
I'm just going to start again with the new Pi now that I know the NR transfer is going to work
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