@bentael Sorry for the delayed reply.
I understand everything you said, but I don't think that is my problem. I am using the "admin" user that is uid:1.
After digging into the code I was able to figure this out. It looks like the group that grants admin access has changed from "administrators" to "Administrators" which is case sensitive. I was able to solve my problem with
hset group:gid Administrators 2
I based this on line 752 in user.js
groups.getGidFromName('Administrators', function(err, gid) {
which sort of just creates another name for the same group... I think. Not sure if this would work throughout the codebase or not.