Advocate IIThank You - This WORKED!
Previously I had connected using a 'Power BI Dataset' from the Conection Type dropdown menu, which is no longer available in the updated version of Report Builder. This also stopped working as a Deployment Pipeline Rule when I tried to publish a minor update thru the pipeline.
With the configuration change listed the above post, the report runs appropriately and I have also confirmed that I can again use a PBI Deployment Pipeline rule for the 'Azure Analysis Services' connections like before.
Noteworthy, these AAS XMLA connections do not auto-bind with the associated semantic models in the parallel pipeline's workspaces. Thus one still has to use a Deployment Rule to re-bind as the paginated report is promoted to the higher environments.