AST Configuration Assistance

Sorry about that. That command should have been "ls -l ./services/otel_collector/defaults".
That said, your other commands are showing the config files to have the correct permissions. Assuming the defaults directory and the files within it are all readable by everyone, and the defaults directory is also executable by everyone, it would probably be easier to reinstall AST. If you do, make sure your umask is set to something that won't remove permissions you need. The above blog goes through doing this.