"secret not found" reported by ExternalSecret

Question

I have been struggling with this issue for the past 2 days and I'm stuck. I'm using External Secrets Operator to obtain secrets from Vault: https://external-secrets.io/

It seems ExternalSecret is not creating the secret. This is my yaml file:

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1beta1
kind: ExternalSecret
metadata:
  name: ape-external-secrets
  namespace: ape-test
spec:
  data:
  - remoteRef:
    secretKey: secret-ape-username
      key: secret-ape
      property: secret-ape-username
  - remoteRef:
    secretKey: secret-ape-password
      key: secret-ape
      property: secret-ape-password
  refreshInterval: 1h
  secretStoreRef:
    kind: SecretStore
    name: ape-vault-eso
  target:
    creationPolicy: Owner
    name: secret-ape

The error given by ExternalSecret K8s object is: secret not found

I looked and indeed there is no secret-ape secret created.

For Secret Store, I'm using the K8s authentication method to obtain credentials from Vault:

apiVersion: external-secrets.io/v1beta1
kind: SecretStore
metadata:
  name: ape-vault-eso
  namespace: ape-test
spec:
  provider:
    vault:
      auth:
        kubernetes:
          mountPath: k8s-dv1
          role: ape-app-kv-ro
          serviceAccountRef:
            name: ape-svc-dv
      path: kv/secret-ape
      server: 'https://dv-vault.xyz.local'
      version: v2

No error is given by the SecretStore so it looks like it is validated properly. Message is store validated

I'm deploying both of these via ArgoCD. Any insights into what I may be doing wrong? From the documentation here, it says ExternalSecrets object should create the secret.