Trying out Devuan again after some time away.  I also encountered this issue.  In my case, I had to autoremove nvidia-persistenced as you did, then after I had installed other things (including build-essential) I tried installing nvidia-persistenced again and it worked properly this time.

Maybe the nvidia driver package needs to include the headers as a dependency?

sudo apt install -t beowulf-backports linux-headers-amd64

but in my case it was already installed , maybe because i had installed the "Nvidia-Linux ..run" previously or maybe installing "nvidia-driver" via backports installed those aswell?

i am back with the setting up of the desktop PC;
it has a Nvidia graphics card GTX 1650 and i am having problems setting the graphics card up properly.

tried to install the "NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-450.80.02.run" package, but some things seemed not function,
so i went the "official" route through devuan drivers.

what i did

1. went to Debian Wiki to lookup how it is done there
https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

2. adapted from debian-backports to devuan-backports (in my case beowulf-backports)

3. installed the one-liner

apt install -t beowulf-backports nvidia-driver 

4. deleted nvidia-persistenced (it gave error)

apt autoremove nvidia-persistenced

5. reboot

it would normally boot and give some error "nvidia-persistenced not found" somewhere during boot process;
but then Xserver would start and i could normally logonwas  to a functional desktop.

was trying to test then with GFXbench, and some error were visible so probably the nvidia-driver installation is faulty?

[clew] [INFO ]: App data path: /home/rich/.local/share/Kishonti Ltd/GFXBench GL
[INFO ]: Synchronization path: /home/rich/.cache/Kishonti Ltd/GFXBench GL/synchronized
[INFO ]: Config path: /home/rich/Downloads/gfxbench_gl-linux-qt-4.0.13+community/config
[INFO ]: Data path: /home/rich/.cache/Kishonti Ltd/GFXBench GL/synchronized/data
[INFO ]: Plugin path: /home/rich/Downloads/gfxbench_gl-linux-qt-4.0.13+community/plugins
[INFO ]: Test image path: /home/rich/Downloads/gfxbench_gl-linux-qt-4.0.13+community/images
[INFO ]: Asset image path: :
[INFO ]: Dispatching getTests
[INFO ]: Dispatching getConfigurations
[INFO ]: Dispatching getSessions
[INFO ]: Dispatching getBestResults
[INFO ]: Dispatching getBestResults
[INFO ]: Dispatching getSystemInfoItems
[b][clew] Could not load OpenCL
[cudaw] Could not load CUDA library
[INFO ]: GLFW init
[clew] Could not load OpenCL
[clew] Could not load OpenCL[/b]
[INFO ]: Service instance constructor
[INFO ]: Synchronizing from: http://cdn.gfxbench.com/production/gfxbench_gl-4.0.0.json.gz
[INFO ]: No configuration selected --> disable all tests!!!
[INFO ]: Selecting configuration: GeForce GTX 1650

maybe someone can tell me where i have made the error?

thank you very much.