Well, it turns out that I have this BP for my character's footsteps. Notification events, I check the surface and trigger the event. Within the Unreal editor, everything works perfectly fine, the strings match up nicely. However, when I build the game, it doesn't work (along with other things that have switches, but let's focus on this for now).
The system works in the editor, but not in the packaged game. When I profiled the build, I noticed that all of those footstep switches say the same thing: "Switch to "Default"" when it should say Switch to Dirt, Water, Grass, etc., which is what happens when I profile the game from the editor.
I found some things on the internet, but none of them seem to be working for me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GameAudio/comments/vjvgu9/wwiseue4_sound_data_issues/
https://www.audiokinetic.com/qa/7508/switch-container-doesnt-work-ue4-when-packaging-for-windows
And of course, I'm NOT using Event-based packaging because it's a mess, nobody should use it, and it's already caused me problems in the past.
Wwise 2021.1.12 Unreal 5.0.3 Windows 11