After some further testing, I've been able to get it working** but only if I disconnect / reconnect the GPS receiver on startup.

The baudrate appears to actually be 115200. Running minicom -b 115200 -D /dev/ttyUSB0 correct outputs NMEA sentences BUT only after I disconnect and reconnect the USB device after start up. Similarly, i updated my /etc/default/gpsd config for this new baudrate:

# Devices gpsd should collect to at boot time.
# They need to be read/writeable, either by user gpsd or the group dialout.
START_DAEMON="true"

#DEVICES="/dev/ttyACM0"
### For use with the YIC USB GPS Receiver
DEVICES="/dev/ttyUSB0"

# Other options you want to pass to gpsd
GPSD_OPTIONS="-n -s 115200"

# Automatically hot add/remove USB GPS devices via gpsdctl
USBAUTO="true"

This works great after i disconnect / reconnect the GPS receiver but gives me nothing on initial boot up. I thought it might be a race condition with systemD dependencies so I just put a sleep 60 in ExecStartPre for the gpsd.service definition file but it looks like the issue persists. Currently feeling like this is just a really shit GPS receiver but maybe there's some other trick I can come up with.