SOLVED! php8.2-curl was missing. I got the idea after I re-read my older threads here in this forum and found this: Update to 1.1.4 failed - #2 by james – older version, same problem.
So I had recognized before that major distri upgrades don’t automatically update all the PHP stuff from the former version. This happened here some time ago when I upgraded from Devuan 3 to Devuan 4. I had to install all the PHP stuff anew, as Devuan 3 came with PHP 7.4, and Devuan 4 with 8.2. I was pretty sure that I got all the modules that I had installed before, but well …