After sleuthing with Gemini, it turns out my drives partition table was configured for MBR and not GPT. After initializing GPT on the drive, and formatting it with exFAT, and plugging the drive in, the drive immediately shows up:
Considering your KB does not mention this anywhere (yeah, honestly who uses MBR these days, well apparently goof balls like me), I would highly recommend adding something about GPT being the required partition table. This isn’t an issue with normal Linux (even with CachyOS which is a rolling-release arch based distro), so wondering what might be the disconnect here.
Anyway, we can close this request. Hopefully that guide gets updated so someone doesn’t have a confusing situation like me. Thanks!