Fallback entities for unreliable devices in automations

You’re not missing anything. For now, Jinja macros are not super useful as they are local to a given configuration entry. As I understand it, there is currently work being done on this function. As it stands your best bet is to create a template binary sensor for each pair of sensors. If you have a lot of sensors you can use the template tool to build out the yaml and copy/paste it into your config as show here