drush status only showing drush info, not drupal info
If the drushuser account doesn't have read permission to the directory, it won't be able to run and bootstrap Drupal to get information, so it falls back to displaying the status it can which is Drush status.

If drushuser isn't the same as accountname above, it's very unlikely that drushuser will have access to the home directory of accountname. The root user can read files in every directory, so that is probably why it works as root.

You should be able to run drush as accountname or if you can put the public_html files into a shared location and make sure that the permissions are set so that both users share a group that has read access.