I seem to be back up and running with out any loss of functionality.
The fix was seemingly not too painful in the end. It was more of a mosquito bite than a snake bite.
I'm not sure which of the steps below resolved the problem for me. Perhaps a combination.
I didn't delete anything in my WHMCS folder. I just copied over the patch update which seemed to do something but eventually resulted in the same error. I was getting error 500. I then copied over all the 7.1.2 files and everything just worked (aside form needing to delete the install folder)
Upgrade done, all integrations still 100% functional.