I have been playing around with it. Ended up buying more recently of the lifetime stuff. Tried their android app and windows/web interface. Web interface has been 100% rock solid. Android app not so much:

• Camera sync sometimes doesn’t sync all the pictures. Sometimes it doesn’t show synced pictures either, I have to manually navigate to the folder. Not sure whats up.
• Android app has a long delay on starting up sometimes.
• Poor battery optimization comparatively speaking to alternatives (nextcloud & gphotos)
• App occasionally crashes, but that’s stopped recently.

Also, just full disclosure I am on Graphene, so sometimes things are a bit different. Recently, I have started to setup their rclone connection to use it as an offsite encrypted backup of ~ half a terabyte of important shit. Its my 2nd offsite backup and I am planning to regularly test that repository (using Kopia). While I am happy with it so far (outside the android app), I am still a bit wary on how reliable they are. They have been around for a few years now, so I feel more confident, just overall being cautious until I see a public audit of their backend. The client code is all OS (supposedly, I haven’t confirmed beyond the rclone code), so you can check that if you like (which should at least confirm local encryption before transit).

figured I would respond, but your advice was good! got me to find a known good and work from there. posted an update to the OP.

Ok, so travelers in a virtual 3 way are non-existant really. They are repurposed as the load wire in a single-way. Basically: virtual 3-way eliminates the 3-way setup, instead having the 2nd switch simply communicate that it was pressed to the main smart switch. If you peek at the link I posted in OP, you can see a diagram of the wiring (obviously in the correct state).

I am confident with a multimeter, are you recommending a continuity test? I could tie the load & traveler together, unless there is some other way to test which traveler corresponds to which main switch?

Do you have a recommended software for diagrams? hopefully something quick n’ easy to use. I can provide a picture, but only one switch is clear unfortunately.