About to give up, but finally sorted it out.

Moving from a client’s localhost installation, it’s proven to very difficult. The first round of frustrations included:

• Wipes existing usernames so you can’t log in
• Doesn’t clean up paths
• No facility to for changing the siteurl/Home settings, so it continually reroutes to localhost:8888
• Didn’t import anything from uloads
• Re-running the imports screws up the users and options table again so you have to reset passwords and URLs.

I tried it twice, completely nuking my installation in between. Hours wasted.

But I believe I finally have it working; but it involved a couple more important steps beyond what’s on the tin.

• The databases on the import and export servers have to have the same prefix. If it wasn’t set that way on one of the installations you will probably have to start over.
• Import the database, which will log you out. Immediately change the siteurl/home fields in the options table, then…
• You’ll need to be able to re-set an existing administrator password, through phpmyadmin or the like, so you can get back in — your previous user account will be gone.
• You’ll need your old uploads directory, because the files don’t necessarily come across. You might need to upload them.
• Use Search Regex or your favorite tool to change all the old relative links (in my case, https://localhost:8888) to the new relative link.
• Or “Better Search Replace” to go after the whole database.
• Go through all your theme settings with a fine-toothed comb for further instances of the dev server URL.

This may be because the theme is “Divi,” and the images were part of the “projects” custom post type. It did in fact bring over the theme and a child theme folder.