Datastore on flex nodejs appengine stopped working

Question

After making some updates to an app I'm working on, I pushed the app up via gcloud app deploy --version dev and everything seemed to push just fine, but upon further inspection, any of my calls (get or post) that use the @google-cloud/datastore package fail with Bad Gateway 502 - nginx error.

I've put in console.logs everywhere and they never get past the line before any datastore.whatever() calls. tested with .save, .runQuery, and .update.

Weirder still, i can access the datastore just fine via my console, and my localhost still works 100% as expected, pulling the data from my cloud datastore.

I even tried to narrow it down via manual_scaling update i found here but that didn't seem to do anything

thoughts?