Set value in a choices.js dropdown after it's been created

Using Drupal 9.4 and choices.js 10.2 (design required a highly styled dropdown that I couldn't do with a standard element). The choices dropdown is created by a view.

When I had the plain select item in place, I could use javascript to set an optional default value for one of the two dropdowns. However, with the choices.js dropdown, I haven't found a simple way to make that happen despite scouring the github and stack overflow.

in my JS, I have tried:

var $org = '{{ org_id }}';
$id = "#fcs-{{ paragraph.id() }} #edit-field-audience-target-id";
const dropdown = new Choices(document.querySelector($id));
dropdown.setChoiceByValue($org);

However, the console tells me: "choices.min.js?rqlz1t:2 Trying to initialise Choices on element already initialised". I was hoping there was another method where I can tap into an existing Choices instance and call setChoiceByValue('x').

I might be able to do everything manually, but I want to make sure I'm not missing something.

You can set a selected: true property on the item you want to be auto-selected.

[{ value: "red", label: "Red"}, { value: "blue", label: "Blue", selected: true }]

See https://github.com/Choices-js/Choices#choices

Also see https://github.com/Choices-js/Choices#setchoiceschoices-value-label-replacechoices which details multiple ways to define the input data.