NVM… This has nothing to do with vault, checking the k8s pod status should have been the first thing I looked at after the logs…
recent pod events
Warning Unhealthy 22m (x2 over 22m) kubelet Liveness probe failed: Get "https://10.64.73.30:8200/v1/sys/health?standbyok=true": net/http: request canceled (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)
Normal Killing 22m kubelet Container vault failed liveness probe, will be restarted
Warning Unhealthy 21m kubelet Readiness probe failed: Get "https://10.64.73.30:8200/v1/sys/health?standbyok=true&sealedcode=204&uninitcode=204": dial tcp 10.64.73.30:8200: connect: connection refused
Normal Pulled 21m (x2 over 23m) kubelet Container image "hashicorp/vault:1.12.2" already present on machine
Warning Unhealthy 18m (x34 over 22m) kubelet Readiness probe failed: Get "https://10.64.73.30:8200/v1/sys/health?standbyok=true&sealedcode=204&uninitcode=204": net/http: request canceled (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)
Warning BackOff 8m (x25 over 13m) kubelet Back-off restarting failed container
Warning Unhealthy 3m7s (x85 over 23m) kubelet Readiness probe failed: Get "https://10.64.73.30:8200/v1/sys/health?standbyok=true&sealedcode=204&uninitcode=204": net/http: request canceled while waiting for connection (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)
another forum search and I found what I missed the first time somehow… TLS handshake error - #7 by jpolania
sorry for the relatively pointless post 
Edit:
I’m not sure the linked post is my answer because looking at the events the health checks are being issued with https. Could this be related to the cert afterall?
Also, there’s still the matter of my recovery keys… So please, any thoughts would be greatly appreciated lol