Found a lead finally. Of the countless threads I read, not one had mentioned this.
I am able to create accounts using ldapadd on the local server and remote servers are able to connect to the ldap server to retreive users. However, when trying to create a user from a remote server, I'm getting
ldap_bind: Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
Yet if I try to add a user, I do get the password prompt so this is an admin authentication problem right? It's not a TLS problem because I don't even have TLS entries in the slapd.conf file. For testing, I'm only running non secured port 389.