Set OrderBy on Grouped Query Involving Smart Map Field
Okay, I've been able to solve this and figured I'd share what I discovered. The key for each group is the value of the state so really what I was after here was a key sort and just didn't realize it. So I found Michael Rog's "SuperSort" plugin which has a twig filter for running a ksort and that addressed it perfectly for me making a small adjustment to use supersort in the response.

{% set resorts = craft.entries().section('resortsList').orderBy('title ASC').all() %}
{% set resortsByState = resorts|group('address.state')|supersort('ksort') %}


I'm interested in other solutions too that don't require a plugin, but this particular direction got things going for me.