I ended up recreating a fresh VM with Ubuntu 20.04 and re-installing a LAMP stack and instead of going with PHP8.0 I installed 7.4 directly and it went through the installation fine.
If anyone stumbles upon this thread and you have similar issue I recommend (at the time of writing this) just go with PHP 7.4 from a clean install of Ubuntu.
This guide was very useful. *NOTE the PHP7.4 package was not directly installable on Ubuntu20.04 you have to add the repository see the 2nd link for that.
Installation Guide:
Add PHP7.4 repository, see “Matigo’s answer”