BINGO Got it to work. Not sure if others had a problem with this or its something new. but here it is.

However, there is a bug on the generated startup script that prevents PM2 from automatically run at startup. You will need to edit /etc/init.d/pm2-init.sh and

replace: export PM2_HOME=“/root/.pm2”
with: export PM2_HOME=“/home/pi/.pm2”

Got this from here: https://bekti.io/automatically-start-a-node-js-application-on-raspberry-pi/