Hi Lyle,
Thank you for all the details, it helps us a lot!
After taking a quick look, I suspect you are not using the Elementor posts widget, but it seems to be an addon widget, maybe the one from Essentials or similar. If you replace it with the regular Elementor posts widget, that will resolve the issue.
We are trying to integrate the best we can, but unfortunately some addon custom post widgets work very differently from the original posts or product widgets.