Can't connect to remote DigitalOcean database
I was able to resolve this from the info found here:

https://skoop.dev/blog/2019/10/04/PHP-and-the-DigitalOcean-MySQL-cluster/

The problem stemmed from the default authentication method for MySQL v8 is caching_sha2_password, which the article above suggests is not supported by php yet.

As the article suggests, we can switch back to the old authentication method with the following query:

ALTER USER 'myuser'@'%' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'thepasswordyouwant';


After making this alteration to the dbuser, I was able to connect to the digitalocean database without issue.