Hi @Retired_mod - thanks for your response.
Not sure what's happened here...this is now working for me, so either the issue has been patched, or the issue was somehow related to my group management where the external location read permissions were mapped to a "Data Engineer" group that existed at the account level, but was not actually being properly mapped via databricks_mws_permission_assignment to the respective workspace (which I have now rectified).
...I think that's probably the case, though I'm not sure in that situation why I was able to copy the file successfully via dbutils.fs.cp as a workaround until now (as that seemed to imply that I did have access to read the file).