Been able to answer all of my other questions after some time for awhile, but this one is persistent. I’ve definitely got things like “Alpha is Transparency” turned on, and I’ve examined the file in an image editing app. Despite all of this, alpha still shows a white box in both scene and game view.
An internet search suggested to me that this may be related to how Macs unzip the file, but I would think that trying to delete the corners in Preview should have fixed that, if it were somehow that.
Update: Turning off “preserve specular lighting” did it for some reason. Maybe that was in the tutorial but I missed it.