Issues with Mixpanel Initialization and Tracking Using GTM Tag Template Causing TypeError

I recently switched to using GTM for initializing Mixpanel client side and am seeing issues for my downstream tags that access the mixpanel variable to call mixpanel.identify and mixpanel.track are hitting errors like: "TypeError: mixpanel.track is not a function". It seems to be a sequencing problem but as best I can tell I'm initializing Mixpanel with the Init tag before my page-level tags explicitly and likely before my event tracking though I'm not specifically tying them together. This seemed to work fine before switching to their tag template. Wondering if it's a problem mixing the templated tags and custom code or maybe a change in variable names.