[Answered ]-Heroku with whitenoise not serving django staticfiles

1👍

Apparently

# Extra places for collectstatic to find static files.
STATICFILES_DIRS = [
    os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'static'),
]

needs to be

# Extra places for collectstatic to find static files.
STATICFILES_DIRS = [
    os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static'),
]

staticfiles still created in correct location, probably because of VARIABLES
getting overwritten by

django_heroku.settings(locals())