What you’ve detailed there seems right to me. HA is dependent on how Open Zwave reports data back. This reminds be of someone that was working with a door-hinge sensor a while back. They had to set up a template sensor to get a useful true/false to build automations from.
You might be able to do this if you can find an entity that’s reflecting the 0/255 traffic you’re seeing in the log. See if there’s another entity based on the “aeon_labs_zw089_recessed_door_sensor_gen5_2” style name that was autogenerated. With my TriSensor, I got 4 or 5 entities when pairing it.