So finally got back to working on this... (tough to play with fire alarms with young kids constantly in the house due to covid!)
Nothing was in the debug when doing a test or smoke in a can... I went through some reset process on the smoke detectors. I tried to exclude and re-include but couldn't get the exclude to work for some reason.
Doing the reset on the detectors seems to have worked. I get a "testing" status and smoke in a can did an activation and appropriate alerts.
Kinda makes me nervous as I still have no clue what happened and want these to be reliable... but guess is what it is