Your screenshot shows at least one feature with an fme_text_string so it's probably not a configuration issue. Are you 100% sure all features should have a fme_text_string?

FME recognizes all features as fme_text, so according to the documentation I expected the fme_text_string, fme_text_size and fme_rotation attributes to have values.

Let me rephrase my question: can you show a feature in ArcGIS that has a text string and then that same feature in FME where it does not have a text string?

Seems. If you open the gdb of the example in ArcGIS you will be able to see the texts. But if you read the annotations with FME, fme_text_string is missing.

I don't have ArcGIS, so I can't use the ESRI-version of the Geodatabase reader. However, if I use the OpenAPI Geodatabase reader I can see all points have a TextString attribute (which is not the same as fme_text_string).

So then a LabelPointReplacer to turn them into actual text objects does the trick.

Thanks @Hans van der Maarel​. The TextPropertyExtractor transformer seems to fix the problem as well.