The 1.16 version of storage drawers is not tagged as compatible with 1.16.5 which prevents installation in custom modpacks (at least easily, there's gotta be a way to force curseforge to do it... but my efforts thus far haven't been successful)

It looks correctly tagged to me. What version does CF think is latest?

My apologies, either there was something weird going on with CF when I was working on the pack that day or this was user error (probably the latter...) as I can now find it in the curseforge client and it shows up on the curseforge site with 1.16.5 versions that are compatible going back a very long time.