Batching jobs - local vs deployed on environment

Hi everyone! I've been dealing with such a head scratching issue, and I've tried just about everything I can think of.

Here's a distilled version what I'm working with:

$jobs = collect([]);

Model::query()
    ->select([
        ...
    ])
    ->where(...)
    ->with(...)
    ->chunk(2000, function ($chunk) use ($jobs) {
        if ($chunk->isNotEmpty()) {
            $jobs->push(new JobForBatch(
                arg1,
                arg2,
            ));
        }
    });



$batch = Bus::batch($jobs->toArray())
    ->name(...)
    ->onQueue('default_long')
    ->then(function (Batch $batch) {
       ...
    })->catch(function (Batch $batch, Throwable $e) {
       ...
    })->finally(function (Batch $batch) {
        ...
    })->dispatch();

Nothing crazy here; I'm querying a large set of data, chunking it, creating a new Job for each chunk, pushing that Job to a collection, and then ultimately, pushing those jobs to be worked on in a Batch. In my local environment, this works absolutely fine.

The issue I'm having is as soon as I deploy this to my development/staging environments and run this job, it fails. Here is the error I consistently get:

Call to a member function add() on null {"exception":"[object] (Error(code: 0): Call to a member function add() on null at /var/app/current/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Bus/PendingBatch.php:257)

If I drill down into that PendingBatch.php file (this is a Laravel vendor file) at the method + line it's calling out -

public function dispatch()
    {
        $repository = $this->container->make(BatchRepository::class);

        try {
            $batch = $repository->store($this);

            $batch = $batch->add($this->jobs);
        } catch (Throwable $e) {
            if (isset($batch)) {
                $repository->delete($batch->id);
            }

            throw $e;
        }

        $this->container->make(EventDispatcher::class)->dispatch(
            new BatchDispatched($batch)
        );

        return $batch;
    }

...referencing that error, it's not difficult to see where it's failing, but I have no idea what would be causing the $batch object to be null. Even more so, I have no idea why this would run locally but NOT when deployed to an non-local environment.

The thread I was pulling was the fact that we use an Aurora RDS instance on our deployed environments, but just regular old MySQL 8 for local... however, from various logging that I've introduced, as well as where this job actually bombs out, I don't believe that discrepancy is the issue. The PHP versions are the same, Redis and RDS instances are sufficiently beefy; I'm at a total loss. I've also logged & confirmed that the $jobs collection that gets built up for the batch does contain the proper amount of jobs.

Does anyone have any other threads I could try pulling here? Any guidance would be appreciated!

Note: I do not believe the underlying tasks being performed in the jobs being batched is relevant here, as it never even gets to the point where they would be worked on.