I did end up trying that, and it didnt work unfortunately. I could see that it was breaking somewhere specifically with applying the effect and nowhere else because all my values were initialized just fine. It must have been something else that I added that was blocking the ability to update the attribute set.
I ended up tearing down all the complexity I built around it and started from scratch and was able to apply effects made in BP to the character.
It could have had something to do with having the AbilitySystemComponent initialized in the PlayerState or something else entirely. Not really sure.