Okay so I just wanted to respond to this thread with a better description/example of what we are stuck on, in case anyone wants to jump in with ideas about what could be causing it.
So to help test my theory about having to tap outside of the game itself to get it to display graphics, I changed this part of the index.html:
View attachment 159618'
background-color from "black" to "white"
This allows me to see the bounds outside of the game itself, to prove that it must be touched in any area that isn't in the game window itself.
Here is a video to illustrate this:
Once the game comes up, it runs just fine!