THE FIX:
So if anyone else does the same method I did which was remeshing/topologizing in Maya (because I had maya and doing so wouldn’t limit to only personal use constraints via the addon trial used in this tutorial), after exporting the obj from Maya and re-importing it back into blender, Maya had attached it’s own material which I overlooked whilst focusing solely on the normals.
Solution? Remove the material that Maya added in Blender and just add a fresh one