drupalSettings object not showing for anonymous users. core/drupalSettings is added as a library dependency
Solved the issue... and the answer is weird...

within the html.html.twig file, we have a &lt;div class="body-inner"&gt; tag that wrapped the &lt;js-bottom-placeholder token="{{ placeholder_token }}"&gt; placeholder.

For whatever #drupalWTF reason, if this placeholder tag is wrapped inside of a div, drupalSettings will load an empty object. Once I moved it directly underneath the body tag, it worked fine. 

Hope this helps someone!