Lighthouse Error- Charset Declaration Missing or occurs too late

When I test my page for loading/speed optimization I receive the following error in lighthouse,

"Charset declaration is missing or occurs too late in the HTML"

This doesn't make much sense to me because when I go to the header.php the following line is first and active:

<meta charset="<?php bloginfo( 'charset' ); ?>">

However, when I look at the source code I see that the Custom css is the first thing that loads, overriding the meta charset & pushing it way down on the page.

How do I force that header to load first??