For anyone stumbling across this post with a search, the problem was that I had forgotten this line (a little silly on my part!):
So I was waiting on an event group that didn't exist.

Hey, I've got a system working at the moment that scans for BLE beacon packets and has also connected to a WiFi network. I haven't tried to get it doing anything much more advanced yet (talking to sockets, connecting to other Bluetooth devices) but at least that functionality seems to be coexisting ...

This can't be as hard as I'm making it... I just want to respond to a GET request. I have the esp32 connecting to a WiFi network just fine, and it's also running some BLE beacon scanning. I tried to use the http_request example code but whenever xEventGroupWaitBits fails the chip errors, aborts and ...