Multiselect Values? Nice UI, horrible deployment for devs

I am a little baffled. I spent the money and purchased the Pro version of this as the components seemed exactly what I need and now that I am implementing some they are more difficult to use than they really should be. My Issue: I have a filterable multiselect dropdown. I can select multiple options. It looks great. How does one get the list of selected items? I have seen some wild examples of traversing through the DOM to find sting matches from the <li> to text inside <options> to get the VALUE of the drop down. Is this really the only way? There should be something closer to:

const vals = $('.mdb-select#myAwesomeDropdown').material_select('get_selected_values');
// Which should return and array of values
console.log(vals); 
// ['val1','val2','val3']

This is how I am currently getting a single value dropdown:

$("div.select-wrapper.initialized option:contains("+$(".booklet-reward input").val()+")").val();

It is not pretty or intuitive and honestly takes more development time to manipulate this library to make a useful front end. I hope someone has a better solution as that is all I could find  through google searches.

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