Ah nevermind, I see this when I run `espanso start`:

"WARNING: An application is currently using SecureInput and might prevent espanso from working correctly."

For anyone else who ends up here with the same problem: this blog post was helpful as it suggested that locking & unlocking my system might remove the lock on secureinput created by loginwindow: https://rakhesh.com/mac/macos-find-app-using-secure-input/