UPDATE: For anyone else who encounters this…
It turns out, the first option DOES work. You can pass an array to a meta_value. HOWEVER, the operator ‘=’ does not work. Changing the compare to ‘IN’ works for my scenario. Final code:
$people_array = array(73227,970674,17293);
$args = array(
'taxonomy' => 'people',
'meta_query' => array(
array(
'key' => 'person_id',
'value' => $people_array,
'compare' => 'IN'
),
)
);
$people = get_terms( $args );