Thank you! This was super helpful. I'd totally misunderstood how the random seed was expected to work -- what you've described here makes a lot of sense to me, now, and with that things are working a-okay.
Also, I'm feeling foolish to admit that I thought I was running 1.17, but was actually a few versions behind on lilt 🤦 that was totally my bad!
Perhaps fewer hairy edges than I initially thought! In the end, the only hairy edge was me.