Great to hear you got it sorted and that it is still possible after all the changes in the past years.
As I’m sure you are well aware (following your recent battle getting emonhub to update) but worth pointing out just in case (and for other users) those local changes could now block the emoncms app module from updating when you run the updater. That is fine as long as you do not want/need the possible future changes, it will not stop emoncms working, you just need to be aware when you update and if you want to upgrade the app module, “git stash” these changes or simply reset the repo to lose the changes and then reapply them after the update.