Thanks for replying. Update so far: I followed this article Dude! Where's my vCSA SSL Cert chain? - vRyan.co.uk - Virtualization Blog from someone experiencing this certificate issue, and like theVElement mentions, the trustpoints.pem file in the rhttpproxy SSL container was empty and config.xml had it commented on both the VCSA and the PSC appliances, which I don't know how it was working before the restore since it's in the rhttpproxy config from the backup I had.
However the problem still remains even after a reboot of both devices. Now this whole time I think the problem has been that the VPXD service in the VCSA never listens on port TCP 8089 as seen in my manual restart attempt of vmware-vpxd. Looking at logs from months before the restore, the messsage "vmware-vpxd: VC SSL Certificate does not exist, it will be generated by vpxd" has always been there and the VPXD used to start and listen on 8089 after a few seconds.
if I open the shell of VCSA and type "iptables -L port_filter -n --line-numbers" the port 8089 is never listed as listening, so I don't think it's a firewall issue here. The output is not very helpful as to what is going on.
mgmlxvcs1:~ # /etc/init.d/vmware-vpxd restart
vmware-vpxd: already stopped
vmware-vpxd: VC SSL Certificate does not exist, it will be generated by vpxd
Waiting for the embedded database to start up: success
Executing pre-startup scripts...
vmware-vpxd: Starting vpxd by administrative request.
success
vmware-vpxd: Waiting for vpxd to start listening for requests on 8089
Waiting for vpxd to initialize: ..........................................................Wed Aug 8 00:26:27 UTC 2018 Captured live core: /var/core/live_core.vpxd.6497.08-08-2018-00-26-27
[INFO] writing vpxd process dump retry:2 Time(Y-M-D H:M:S):2018-08-08 00:26:25
.Wed Aug 8 00:26:39 UTC 2018 Captured live core: /var/core/live_core.vpxd.6497.08-08-2018-00-26-39
[INFO] writing vpxd process dump retry:1 Time(Y-M-D H:M:S):2018-08-08 00:26:37
.failed
failed
vmware-vpxd: vpxd failed to initialize in time.
vpxd is already starting up. Aborting the request.