Well, I did run unbound -dd as suggested and this is where I received the errors in the subject.
Strange that unbound shows /unbound/unbound.conf - no idea why. It maybe a bug, since doing unbound-control start | stop
does not produce any errors and proper default unbound.conf is picked up. The issue is only with the reload part.
If it was chroot issue it would manifest in more places and/or commands. I will keep investigating.
directory: /opt/var/lib/unbound
chroot: /opt/var/lib
The reason why I have chroot set like this is so I can keep my rpz files in /opt/var/lib/zones - independent location from unbound installed files. That I don’t think should present an issue. I am specifing -c location when doing unbound-control.