I found a solution that, while not solving the problem, does let me continue on the project. It seems that older versions of the Open Restaurant app do not have this bug. I found someone who uploaded an older version in his old project files here - https://github.com/leveson/app-development-with-swift. So while the problem persists, at least there's a workaround for those who need it now? Still, the current version needs to be fixed, or have the guide changed. Can't find any contact information to the author, so I hope this is the right place for this?

There are images with the .png extension in the folder and I can open them. I can reach them in a browser if I exclude .png from the imageURL but in code this results in a request timed out error. In menuItems the imageURL property does include the extension, just as in the JSON returned from the server on a fetchMenuItems request.

Yes, I did. I also set the port to 8080, as I think it says in the newest edition of the book. One thing to note is the rest of the server functionality is intact, the only thing that doesn't work is the images.