It was an issue in how we called the custom notifcation, passing in the wrong field.
I am already using a SMTP server because I used sendinblue, I also tried to take away that and use Kinsta’s built in server and it also didn’t work. I also tried disabling all plugins but ACF as my site doesn’t function without it.
It’s strange that when I click test email it’s fine, the emails that come through have a subject and body, when a real user gets a custom notification, they get the subject line but not the message body.
This is a live site and we just can’t figure it out.