Freeswitch cannot access MySQL without mod_mariadb loaded. Anything you think it was doing without that module loaded was most likely from sqlite, which it uses by default if it cannot access any other database, or you are confusing what ASTPP/ODBC is doing with what Freeswitch is doing.
Here is one last tip that might be related since you are using MariaDB, although that will probably not work properly because it is not 100% compatible with MySQL 8. Debian 9/10/11 MariaDB ODBC 3 connector was broken at one time. I don’t know if it still is but the fix to get around that was to use the ODBC 2 connector.
cd /usr/src
wget https://downloads.mariadb.com/Connectors/odbc/connector-odbc-2.0.19/\
mariadb-connector-odbc-2.0.19-ga-debian-x86_64.tar.gz
tar -zxvf mariadb-connector-odbc-2.0.19*.tar.gz
cp lib/libmaodbc.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/odbc/
Then you need to edit /etc/odbcinst.ini and set Driver = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/odbc/libmaodbc.so
Or just use MySQL v8 repo which is what you should be doing in the first place.