I’m afraid I’m out of ideas. This is indeed very bizarre. It’s usually more difficult to stop tick than to enable it.
You can work around it with a Timer. But that works on a delay. Looks like that may be acceptable for your use case. The problem is that I’m worried your project is corrupted somehow if ticks aren’t working.
Did you try creating a new project and see if the player character’s tick event works?
Something else you can try is to run your game locally in the editor. Alt-Tab or press F11 to get your mouse back and then select your character in the Outliner tab while the game is running. You can verify if the checkbox for tick is enabled or not. You could also put a breakpoint in SetActorTickEnabled after though you may get a lot of hits if you have a lot of actors. Might be worth a try to see if anything is disabling the ticks. You could enable that breakpoint after BeginPlay is hit with a separate breakpoint to cut things down.
On a sidenote, where did you put this?
PrimaryActorTick.bCanEverTick = true;
SetActorTickEnabled(true);
Is it in the default constructor?