There were two things I changed to make this work for me.
First was the cd web/
before applying the recipe. I suspect this is on the radar as a common gotcha (I've seen it mentioned elsewhere).
In the docs at Getting started - applying a recipe
Second was using the "minimal" profile to do the drush site-install
. Without this additional change, I found that the blocks from "standard" profile conflicted with blocks to be added by kevinquillen/drupal-base
.