Because you loaded tasmota, the flash memory needs to be wiped before loading WLED. Otherwise, WLED will get strange “settings” from the existing flash memory values, and worse, it will try to use them. If one of the strange settings is related to WIFI settings, it will try to connect to some non-existing ghost wifi SSID so it can present an equally invalid password.
That said, after some period of time, WLED is supposed to revert back to AP mode when it cannot connect to the expected SSID.
How long have you been waiting for the local AP to show up? 30 seconds? 5 minutes? All night? I think it’s 30 seconds, but if it reads the AP timeout from settings, or maybe a setting for if it can even attempt to revert to AP mode… it probably will just sit there.
pyflasher seems to work well for many people to erase and then flash.