Just rooted the box. It was a brutal journey and i must say i kinda hated it for an easy box.
The initial foothold, the enumeration was fun - piecing together all the clues and avoiding the rabbit holes, but hated the mysql config part and all the issues I ran into. Thanks to @T13nn3s for the comment here and the hint about the char limit.
Running a few scripts showed me what to do for the root part. Even though it is pretty straightforward I struggled to get the reverse shell. There are a few articles that describe this, but everything needs to be tweaked and I definitely learnt something new about sudo here.