When I initially completed installation everything was working as expected, but ever since I build and published the Sitecore.Commerce.Engine project from the SDK (sans the sample plugins) catalog data has stopped showing up in Sitecore.
The bootstrap process did succeed, so I'm not sure what the problem is
It turns out that the Sitecore.Commerce.Engine SDK project doesn't reference the following plugins:
And since plugins are only loaded if they appear in the Sitecore.Commerce.Engine.deps.json file, the engine was running without a persistance layer implementation.
Once I added these dependencies via the NuGet feed everything started working again.
It doesn't repro via the SIF installation because it deploys a pre-built version of the SDK that includes the missing plugins in it's "deps" file (possibly due to one of the sample plugins referencing them).
