Assistance with Template sensor/entity not working

Your binary_sensor will always have states of 'on' or 'off'. The front end might map those to different “friendly terms” like “Wet” and “Dry” depending on the device class selected, but for testing the state you must use the underlying 'on'/'off' true states.

Your first example tried to use the friendly terms; and then tried to set three possible states for a binary sensor.