As this has settled in my head a bit I recalled what spurred the original question and this may be a bug in the version of KiCad I’m using . I indeed have Automatically place symbol fields turned on. However, when I edit a part click “Change Symbol…” the new parts come in and the fields are not automatically placed but are stacked how they are laid out in the Symbol Editor if the “Update field”'s check boxes are checked.

Application: KiCad Schematic Editor
Version: 6.0.10-86aedd382b~118~ubuntu20.04.1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 5.15.0-56-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, ubuntu, x11
Build Info:
Date: Dec 18 2022 19:39:35
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
Boost: 1.71.0
OCC: 7.5.2
Curl: 7.86.0
ngspice: 36
Compiler: GCC 9.4.0 with C++ ABI 1013
Build settings:
KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON