Gum Choose returning options as one string delimited with newline - what am I doing wrong?

[g-lok]

I've been at this all day and I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Here is the code:

## Get installation choices
declare -a OPTIONAL_APPS
declare -a APP_CATEGORIES

OPTIONAL_APPS=("Developer_Tools" "DevOps_Tools" "Artist_Tools")
APP_CATEGORIES=$(gum choose "${OPTIONAL_APPS[@]}" --no-limit --header "Select optional apps:")

## test code for damn array
for option in "${APP_CATEGORIES[@]}"; do
  echo "option: $option"
done

When I run this and choose a couple of things from the list, I expect the for loop to iterate through the choices and echo that "option ..." for each choice. However what I get instead is both choices as one string with a newline:

option: Developer_Tools
Artist_Tools

My lazyvim linter is also giving me some gripe about declaring APP_CATEGORIES as an array but using it as a string or something, which sounds about right.

I tried writing some test code and this works just fine:

OPTIONS=("one and" "two and" "three and" "four and" "five and" "six and")
CHOICES=$(gum choose "${OPTIONS[@]}" --no-limit --header "Select some options")

echo "$CHOICES"
for choice in "${CHOICES[@]}"; do
  echo "$choice"
done

So what the heck am I doing wrong in the first example? This has been driving me nuts all day.