Thank you Benoit, Andrei, Michael, Peter and anyone else.

Long story short, I updated MariaDB Server from 10.4.8 to 10.4.14 and problem solved.

I don't have the energy to go back and install 10.4.8 on another server just to see if I can recreate the problem (maybe later) but lesson learned, just do an update first, SMH literally shaking my head. Sorry for the bother and thank you for the suggestions as I did learn a couple tips about checking the Char Set. But just a note, apparently the Char Set had nothing to do with it because I ended up importing utf8 into latin1 just fine.

And looking back I see Michael mentioned: " Database character set shouldn't have an effect as the CREATE TABLE in the mysqldump output should specify the character sets for all columns for the used tables."

Sincerely,

Elliot

Also I did make a dump of just the table in question and nothing
changed in my results. So I did
mysqldump -u username -pPassword -h remote_hosts my_remote_database
my_table > table_dump.sql

That's better take for analysis. Could you bisect table_dump.sql INSERT's
row list to find out the first that won't make it to maria server?

If you'll find such row, the next step I suggest to report a bug on Jira
providing the table definition and the INSERT(s)
which would be pretty easy to reproduce and hopefully to fix too.

Thanks as well!

Andrei

-- 
Elliot Holden
‪(404)884-8593‬
elliot@elliotmywebguy.com
https://www.ElliotMyWebGuy.com