The workaround worked for me and I thank the community for the answer.
I’d like to learn why this didn’t work ‘automagically’. It concerns me that I may run into a similar problem in the future and not know if it’s my code or an anomaly with PlatFormIO. Plus it’s a learning opportunity to find out why this wasn’t 100% transportable from the Arduino IDE. I’ll watch the thread and hopefully learn more about the innards of PlatFormIO