facepalm
Figured out my problem, and it was on my side of things.
I didnt realize that there was another DIV element overlapping with the video player. Because of that, even though the DIV is fully transparent and I could see the embed perfectly, it was preventing any click-thru to the embed itself.
The solution, in case other people run into this issue, is to make sure any DIV overlapping the iframe embed has the following CSS code…
pointer-events:none;
This will make the overlapping element ignore mouse click events and let them pass thru to the next element below them.