After a bit of trying to downgrade my sid to bookworm, it's state is not working on the test box. The test box is currently broken but qemu launches.
Current qemu version is 9.2.0+ds-3~bpo12+2 and that's what was used for the test as described below. I was wondering if it might be a kernel issue so using NFS I exported all the mountpoints I needed to beable to chroot into and launch qemu. The testbox is running vanilla kernel 6.8.2 (not the one in debian). I mounted the testbox to a box running kernel 5.10.38 and it worked as expected. Tried another box with kernel 5.15.14 and it also works. When I tried a box that is on 6.8.2 (different config than the textbox) it again didn't work. I believe the issue is the kernel. I'll have to upgrade the testbox to see if that helps or not. Thank you for your assistance.
