I spent hours digging into the ldaps connection issues I had through the GUI on pfsense. I used openssl s_client in the shell to determine where the issue was with the verification of the CA.
openssl s_client -CAfile /etc/ssl/file.pem hostnamehere:636
Anytime I specified the CA file location openssl returned no errors... so I was perplexed why it wasn't working in the GUI. I eventually ran across this post and I am very grateful:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/145578/ldaps-ad-bind/21
Essentially after changing the LDAP authentication server to LDAPS on port 636 you MUST restart php-fpm. I did this by running option 16 in the console.
I am currently on 2.4.5
I hope this post helps someone else if they find themselves in this situation.