It works! Thanks a bunch @abcoathup 
Seems the culprit was using a forked mainnet to run the tests. When using an ordinary ganache instance, the test passes for both (1) a new project using your code and (2) the original project. With a forked mainnet, both fail.
I sure do love the fork feature, but it can be a bit buggy sometimes. I’ll go ahead and file an issue with the ganache team.
Thanks again for the help!