Don’t name the module. Just “lsmod”, literally. If the module is in place, then when needed, it should load. The command lsmod would tell us if it did load.
Owner does matter sometimes for mounting, but if the person doing the mounting is root (or uses “sudo”), then mount should work regardless of owner or permissions. The earlier messages tended to say the mount point did not exist, and this is a different issue. When there is more than one filesystem storage mechanism (e.g., both eMMC and USB or SD card), then it might be the mount point does not exist on the device the mount was attempted on even if it exists on one of the other devices.
If you ask to list a file or directory, then it is the filesystem missing something, and the message is different than a filesystem failure versus a mount failure. If this is a network share, then it isn’t set up correctly and would be the reason why something is missing. However, it seems you are attempting to mount a network share and you were (at least in the past) failing due to the nls_utf8 issue. Once that is cleared up, then there might be other issues (e.g., if you got past the nls_utf8 issue, then finding the mount point could be the next issue). You might run “dmesg --follow” just before attempting the mount, and see if logging is added during the mount attempt.
I don’t know about CIFS, You probably also need this. In fact it is probably CIFS which was in need of nls_utf8. CIFS is a network filesystem, and while in operation, it likely needs to know about which character set to use…which is an nls_utf8 thing. There could also be other CIFS or network filesystem related programs in need. You should probably go back to the documents and look to see what is required, and if the item is missing, add it back in. Should something be missing, then there is no way to help it.
I myself prefer NFS. You could use this temporarily until you solve the CIFS/nls_utf8 issues.