Turns out my issue was in the header. I had ticker instead of numerai_ticker like the example code. Changing to numerai_ticker gave me 100% live tickers matched.
The documentation on this should be clarified. It currently says the following which does not mention a numerai_ticker option nor explain whatever the semantic difference is.
A
cusip,sedol, ortickercolumn - values must be valid tickers associated with the ticker type in the header.