I'm writing this in hopes of helping others - I just spent a few hours struggling with this. You should be able to run thorough these in 15 - 20 minutes, including one server reboot.
Symptom: You follow the instructions, yet the salt status still returns an error such as:
[CRITICAL] The Salt Master has rejected this minion's public key!
To repair this issue, delete the public key for this minion on the Salt Master and restart this minion.
Or restart the Salt Master in open mode to clean out the keys. The Salt Minion will now exit.
Here's what I did to resolve:
That's it - you should be good to go. I'm posting this as a "question" because I would appreciate feedback. Thank you!