How and when are commerce licenses created, and when does the state change to "active"?
It looks the license is being activated when the "order paid in full" trigger fires, and I didn't have a payment system in place. I thought I had it configured to bypass this, but enabling the example payment system and the payment ui solved the problem.

However, the user still doesn't have access to the node associated with the ACL, so I need to figure that one out, as well.