I'm not an expert in this stuff, but I've rooted it down to this:

1. R (programming language) users attempting to use RMariaDB are having an issue passing authentication to MySQL8.0.

2. This means the R community that uses windows cannot access remotely or locally MySQL databases version 8.0+. (Which is a big deal because its a really big community in R that wants to use MySQL; it'd be like not being able to access MySQL 8.0 if you were a PHP programmer).

3. I've hunted down the status of what the community has done to resolve this issue to these two sites (the second I found through the first, stackoverflow, which is where I began - danblack's comments led me to the second site):

(a) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54099722/how-to-connect-r-to-mysql-failed-to-connect-to-database-error-plugin-caching/54101124#54101124

(b) https://github.com/r-dbi/RMariaDB/issues/134

In (b) above, it is the very last comment that shows where we are at with this, and why I'm posting here. It states, "[try] Removing the code that forces WINCRYPT in mariadb and see if that works on OpenSSL."

Thank you for any help resolving this issue.