I hope I didn't inadvertently imply a correlation between phone rooting and Play Store behavior. It doesn't work for me now because Google wants me to upgrade my currently installed sideloaded version of wallet in order to function at all, but the Play Store won't let me and I'm tired of sideloading the app.

Yep. That combined with the fact that every single checkout counter in my city has their NFC receiver disabled, I just gave up. It's a long rant and I'm on mobile but NFC for payments in its current form was dead on arrival in my opinion. It could be done correctly but it's not.

I wish that it wasn't do risky and capital heavy to get into the payments game...