I2C FTW
Ok, I finally threw in the towel on the LittleFS attempts. That thing is just not congruent to what I am storing here, names raw hexadecimal bytes.
Found a couple of libraries, heck, the Wire.h library has enough to do it. But it chokes on page boundaries, so it's back to Adafruit once again for their I2C EEPROM library.
Dredged up an old I2C breakout board, fired it up, and after a bit of tinkering looks like it works pretty much as a drop-in replacement for the old routines. Just had to tweak the cast on a few variables.
It might not look like much but it's nice when something works. Now for reading (should be easy) and we are making real progress.