Can’t assign taxonomies to post types

I have a frustrating issue with ACF and I can’t figure it out. Maybe user error/lack of knowledge, or maybe a bug.

Let’s say I have created a post type: ‘Pets’. And then I created two taxonomies, ‘Cats’ and ‘Dogs’, successfully assigned to the post type ‘Pets’. The ‘Hierarchical’ toggle is on.

Why then, when I create a new post for ‘Pets’, is there no way to simply select ‘Cats’ or ‘Dogs’ to specify what taxonomy my ‘Pets’ post belongs to? Why is there no dropdown selection or checkbox etc to do this?

What I do have is some sort of tag system, which requires me to manually write a tag-like string for either ‘cats’ or ‘dogs’, but this is useless to me when I need my loop builders to be able to show ‘Pets’ posts by taxonomy (eg. show all posts from taxonomy ‘cats’) I don;t want a system which requires me to specify the specific post tag for every taxonomy, updating the loop builder block settings after the publication of every new post.

Yes, I know I could just create a tag that is identical to my taxonomy name ‘Cats’ for ‘Cats’ and ‘Dogs’ for ‘Dogs’ and assign them that way – but this is getting a bit convoluted and I am still wondering why my current hierarchical registration won;’t work.

I’ve been through every advanced setting and I can’t seem to figure this out. I am experiencing the bug outlined here regarding shortcodes, but I rolled back to 6.3.5 while that gets resolved. I can’t imagine that would affect this registration? Perhaps if registered while I began the new installation with the buggy version then rolled back – maybe these registrations were affected? I don’t know.

Help appreciated.