I followed your repro steps, and am seeing what you’re describing, but I noticed that the tooltip for ‘Spawn on Timer’ says “Determines if Wildlife should be spawned on a timer, or only when receiving events.”
So, under the hood, I think that “Enabled on Game Start” does not send spawn events.
Calling the spawn function worked but only to spawn one not the 4 I had specified in the config. I can certainly work around this in verse but it seems like there might be an issue.