es! that is the image. During the day today, I got help with another issue I was having which, in turn, solved this problem.
For those who may hit on this topic because they are having a similar issue, I will share the particular problem in my case. In addition to this issue with not grabbing the featured image, my posts were also not displaying several of the features in my blog template with Divi Builder (such as comments and the subscribe module). I thought this was a Divi problem not related to the featured image issue. Turns out they were linked:
I had changed the permalink structure on my website to use only the date of the post. Apparently, this was causing the link to redirect to an archive? (This was from Divi tech help- I don’t pretend to understand). It seems an archived post doesn’t pull any of the extra stuff (template, featured image, etc). In any event, they had me change to either a permalink structure with the date and post name or just the post name. This fixed the template issue immediately. Then, I had to reoptimize Yoast due to the permalink change. I also went in and reset my default images and updated the relevant post, just in case it needed to be “refreshed”. I purged all caches and, after a few minutes, the FB sharing debugger was displaying the correct stuff without any issues.