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To aid in troubleshooting, I went ahead and added field

spec.template.spec.cloudInit.insecureSkipSecretsManager: true

to the sample AWSMachineTemplate resources. This modification fixed my startup issues and allowed me to move forward. Any ideas why the default Secrets Manager configuration might not be working for me?

I'm now pretty sure that the real fix for my issue is included in commit https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/cluster-api-provider-rke2/commit/7a85e9f39a69b141b39e777812fcb0694df96ff7 that was just released with 0.2.6 earlier today. Thanks much, maintainers for the quick turnaround!