When setting the textSymbol backgroundColor property with RGBA, the alpha channel will not properly show fully opaque values (alpha = 1) when using RGBA array. The background always has some transparency remaining. Lowering the alpha channel (0.5 or 0.25, etc) does seem to work as expected.
A codepen example using the current 4.26 version of the API is attached. The alpha is set to 1, but the the map can still be seen behind the label background: TextSymbol Background transparency (codepen.io).
I could be missing something, but thinking this is likely a bug.