Did anyone solve this? I have the same symptoms. The Yii Booster page does not have examples on how to correctly preload data and I suspect that the extension is unable to correctly retrieve the ‘text’ field just by looking at how the actual Select2 plugin works (http://ivaynberg.github.io/select2/). It seems an associative array is passed in as the data parameter.
Additionally, the placeholder does not get populated correctly and just says, "undefined" in the dropbox.
I have some code similar to yours, did a console.log() on your ‘e’ variable under events->change, and I was able to see the selected text. Here’s my change function: