Just derived here as a reboot after a recent mariadb broke things for me. The symlink was indeed the fix for me too. Could it be because of my old autogenerated /etc/mysql/debian.cnf file that still points to /var/run/mysqld?
I do not that while the proposed fix does work for me, I needed to manually install mariadb-server-compat . Somehow, I did not have that package installed already. -Pascal -- Homepage (https://pascal.giard.info) École de technologie supérieure (https://etsmtl.ca)

