Tabulator - Cell.setValue creating recursive loop for custom formatter, table not saving data - json

Question

I'll try to be as brief as possible as my situation is unique and I am a fairly new programmer.
TL:DR - Cannot get the row to update, table does not remember initial values when editing, cell.setValue() creates recursive loop, cell.getRow().update() seems to do nothing, row does not resize in the event of editing working (still does not hold on to previous values)), unsure if mutator or cellEdit() callback are potential solutions.
I have JSON data populating my table from an AJAX call to a Java backend. One of the columns can either be one item, a list of multiple items, or none at all. I am using a custom formatter to populate that cell with the list of items, followed by icons to remove those items...
Some text here X
Some other text X
And some more X
When clicking the X icon, it should remove the item, and when clicking the text, it will drop down a list to choose another option.
Some text here X
Some other text X
Added another line X <----removed the previous item and selected a new
The problem I am having is that the table does not continuously hold onto previous values nor concatenates them with new selections. I have written some code to take care of the concatenation issue, but it still does not save that info within the table. I have tried to use cell.setValue() but this creates a recursive loop as all my code is within the custom formatter. I have also tried cell.getRow().update() but this seems to do nothing.
Also, clicking into the drop down and clicking away without selecting a value will still send the previous value as though it was clicked again. I was able to get it to function once, but it only changed the most recent values and did not include the original ones and it did not resize the row to be smaller.
I am unsure if a custom mutator would solve my issue, or even how to get the mutator to interact with the formatter to update the cell every time a change has been made. I also have a cellEdited: function(){} callback that is going to be designed to take the entire row of information as a JSON object to save it within a DAO and considered that I might be able to solve the issue there?
Here is my code for that column. This currently will load the page with the initial design yet does not work with editing. "cell.setValue()" and "cell.getRow().update()" are currently not included because they weren't working properly...
title: "Groups",
field: "associatedGroups",
variableHeight: true,
headerFilter: true,
headerFilterPlaceholder: "Search by Group...",
formatter: function (cell, formatterParams, onRendered) {
var data = [];
var newValue = cell.getValue();
var oldValue = cell.getOldValue();
var newValueIsArray = $.isArray(newValue);
var oldValueIsArray = $.isArray(oldValue);
if (oldValue !== null && newValue !== null) {
if (!oldValueIsArray && newValueIsArray) {
data = data.concat(newValue);
data.unshift(oldValue);
} else if (oldValueIsArray && !newValueIsArray) {
data = data.concat(oldValue);
data.push(newValue);
} else {
data.push(oldValue);
data.push(newValue);
}
} else {
data = newValue;
}
<!-------------------Value of "data" used here to determine visual layout----------------->
},
editor: "select",
responsive:
0,
editorParams:
{
values: groupNames
}
,
sorter: "string",
width:
212
},