Ioni-cli v6.10.1 with v1 App cannot load gulp or run sass task

heya, back to this topic again. I found this thread which supposedly pushed a fix for this issue, The new toolkit (Sept 2020) is supposed to have a fix that checks for Gulp 3 formatted gulpfile and if not, then use Gulp 4 format. On a new PC dev machine I just installed all the latest and greatest (except Ionic v1), using toolkit 3.2.15 - but I am still having the issue. Hopefully there is any easy fix for it as I am trying to eliminate as many legacy dependencies as possible.