I assume you know but in case others don't,
listen=0
is same thing as going to network setting in bitcoin-qt and then checking "deny incoming connections". This setting is about if you want your node to be public for everyone to use to use or if you want it to be private for yourself only.
The public wont be able to use your node with it.
It's about the connection to other nodes, whether your node will accept incoming connections like other nodes that want to be your peer.
Without it, your node will still initialize connections to other nodes (
outbound peers) and will be limited to 10~11 of those.
You'll be using more internet bandwidth with it enabled though.
Fortunately/unfortunately changing listen to 1 did not solve the error.
That's unfortunate.
Figures it's worth the try since the linked issues have the setting left out and since they have proxy enabled,
The default 'listen=1' are set to '0'.