Oh thanks for looking! Yeah I figured out my error and it was really weird, but it turns out my tagged items were working all along!
What happened was I was testing some functions (with Print messages to debug) to iterate over the tagged items, and at some point the Print function was not showing any more messages, leading me to think the code was stuck in a loop and/or not seeing all tags in the group. But then I caught a quick error message in the playtest that said the Print function was being throttled. I think what happened was I was printing in too many for loops and that just caused Print to spazz out and not print.
Anywho long story short yup! All is good. Thanks for trying it out and showing example code too!