Wordpress database setup Windows 2016 IIS

We've been assigned by new company owner to get Wordpress running on a Windows 2016 server using IIS but we have NO experience using any of the elements, so we're dependent on instructions and help.

We began with a clean install of Windows 2016, then installed Wordpress prerequisites: PHP 8.0, VS 2019, Python 3.10, MySQL 8.0. Microsoft guidance which is 6 years out of date says to use Web Platform Installer to install Wordpress. It failed after trying to install older versions of every prerequisite that was already installed. So now apparently we have to install Wordpress manually.

Following https://zaven.co/blog/install-wordpress-iis/ we installed Wordpress, and it opens to the setup screens which seems correct. But it is failing on the database setup screen. In MySQL Workbench, we created new empty model called 'wordpress' in the local database. Then we added a new user 'dba_wp', and granted all roles to it: owner, table.modify, routine.execute, table.insert, then saved the model. We didn't add table.readonly because that sounds like a limitation. Then we tried to establish the db connection to set up Wordpress using the following settings. - database name: wordpress - username: dba_wp - password: ***** - database host: localhost - table prefix: wp_

It keeps failing with the generic Error establishing a database connection.

We didn't get creative about a single step of this process, and it seems like it must be a fundamental issue since we haven't even completed setup, so what could be wrong?