The original tags were correct. collaboration services does control services in the devtools project.

So, this is also to other people in my team.

I did not have an admin account for the web UI, but this is possible via shell commands.

Generally the shell commands to control things are under /srv/phab/phabricator/bin/ and user is one of them.

So this was:

dzahn@phabricator-bullseye:/srv/phab/phabricator/bin$ sudo ./user approve --user theresnotime

Except I got:

Usage Exception: User account "TheresNoTime" is already approved. You can only approve accounts that are not yet approved.

@TheresNoTime Looks already resolved?

Still can't log in:

Check Your Email

You must verify your email address to log in. You should have a new email message with verification instructions in your inbox ({snipped}).

If you did not receive an email, you can click the button below to try sending another one.

(no email is received when clicking the button mentioned)

Ah! So this isn't approval, it's

sudo ./auth verify <email address>

Also ./user empower --user <user> is to make someone admin. But even as admin I don't see a button to verify email of another user.

Regardless, it works with the shell command.

P.S. I also made theresnotime an admin on the test instance to have badge-related permissions and for general testing.