sharepoint 2013 Online column formatting json current lookupvalue no data in object

I am having the exact issue described here, but when I apply the fix (debugmode=false) the formatting works, but no data is displayed. I actually turned debugmode on intentionally so I could see why data wasn't displaying. If I click to edit the list item and then save it, data shows up, formatted correctly, but if the page refreshes it loses the data in the column. Debug=true shows the exact error shown in the linked post. You can see my code here