prevent default not stopping page refresh. Passing form information to and from php with ajax in a wordpress site

Ultimately the form and its old handler were being trashed by some other element in the website. Could have been WP or one of the few plug ins I could not remove as it is the page builder (Elementor, Elementor Essentials). After disabling all the other plug ins it is narrowed down to that. The code solution was:
….

jQuery(document).on('submit', '#ajax-add-to-waitlist-form', function(e){
  e.preventDefault();

…….

Instead of

jQuery('#ajax-add-to-form').on('submit', function(e){
e.preventDefault();