Regarding "Can't connect to pigpiod", if you have to kill and restart pigpiod then it seems to be due to the address binding.

Following this suggestion to setup newer Pi4 to not use ipv6: Github joan2937/pigpio/issues/195#issuecomment-449774632

Edit /lib/systemd/system/pigpiod.service

[Service] ExecStart=/usr/bin/pigpiod -l -n 127.0.0.1