Upgraded to 2021.2.13f1 and now VFX is not displaying (neither in scene or in game)

I was just about to submit my game for review last night, and I did one last test. Of course, I find that a VFX for the "win" animation is not displaying. I'm not sure if the upgrade caused it or if it was something else... not even sure how long it wasn't working, to be honest.

Not only do the VFX not show up... the gizmos for the particles aren't there either. No errors in console. I tried building the project to see if it could just be my dev machine, but still didn't work.

Tried creating a new simple VFX Graph -- no luck.

I added some of the sample prefabs from the Visual Effect Graph (12.1.4) package (e.g. Lightning and Bonfire) and they don't show up either.

Went through a whole slew of things, and completely gorked my game, but finally got it back to where this is the only issue. Downgraded Unity, messed with URP settings, changed rendering to multipass, etc, etc.

I could just take the animation out, but at this point, I need to resolve this, or I will not be happy with the time I've spent on this.

Any tips or ideas or just directions to point me would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Screenshot showing nothing happening:

 

I figured it out. It was actually in the settings of the Visual Effect Component in my Game Object. The Rendering Layer Mask was set to "Nothing" for some reason.