No, that’s not the problem. The problem is, there’s no way to add tags through the application. The tutorial instructs you to create a couple of articles that have tags. As there are no predefined tags, that implies that you should be able to add new tags when adding and editing articles.
From your comment, I now realize that the list of tags should be predefined, and you are supposed to select existing tags to apply them to articles.
I think the solution is to create SQL to insert the predefined tags (funny, cats, gifs) into the tags table, and to clarify how the page is intended to work. I’m going to proceed with the rest of the tutorial with the predefined tags. If that works, I’ll raise a PR to update the tutorial.