Rooted.
I spent far too much time on Priv Esc due to a missing character white space character in my script, assumed it didnt work and went back into enumeration phase 
My hint for rooting is that after you find the thing to exploit, take the instructions it gives you literally ā¦ its not a riddle.
I think also, I took a non standard path to user as I did not need to use āb**************.**pā to get the reverse shell.
Thanks @gioo & @cneeliz