@Cathy_Sarisky Yes! I am indeed on Windows! Ah, the eternal hell of being a Windows developer in a Mac-centric development world continues!! 
Thank you for the advice though! I’ll definitely give WSL a whirl.
I found this other Ghost Forum post as well about installing Ghost on WSL which looks promising so I’ll try that next. The journey continues!! 
PS. IMHO, if there are known issues with local installs on Windows (eg. Card assets flat out not working, out-of-the box, I think they should better publicize that on the “How to install Ghost locally” page. Because currently, that page just lists prerequisites as "A computer running MacOS, Windows or Linux", which is a bit misleading!