I think I found a clue to the problem.
I started to upgrade a few packages at time (~30) from the ~880 packages that we would need to upgrade to get up to date to buster.
Between each small upgrade, I tested lima driver if was still working. After arround 150 upgrades I got error when loading kmscube and I tried to downgrade one package by one from the last step until I get more information.
When I downgraded udev, and libudev I got lima driver back 
To downgrade I needed to change stable to stretch in /etc/apt/sources.list and update
sudo apt update
and downgrade with the following:
sudo apt install libudev1=232-25+deb9u11
sudo apt install udev=232-25+deb9u11
after that, I rebooted and got lima working. If you still have your broke system, maybe you could try it before flashing a new image.
Good luck