Hi,
I can assist you here, I am a fellow maker as a hobby and a Python developer as my full time profession. I have experience with sensors such as this using both MicroPython and Arduino. I am fairly confident we can get this up and running on your Ubuntu box with your USB FTDI breakout board, this is usually my first port of call when trying out a new serial device, FTDI + the device and raw sockets so I can understand what is going on.
I presume you can supply remote connectivity to the Ubuntu host via SSH for completing the work, also I am guessing the sensor is connected to the FTDI chip with the correct voltage level selected and the RX and TX lines the correct way around. If all of this is true I can assist you getting the Python library working.
The end result of the job would be a small Python script pulling data from the sensor using the ft232-bme280 library and then printing the values to the console, or if you prefer I can insert them into something like InfluxDB so you can graph them in a tool like Grafana.
Please do let me know if you have any questions.
Best Regards,
Rob