First of all thank you for your time!
Indeed it does work:
sensor:
- name: nut_rssi
state_topic: "home/OpenMQTTGateway_ESP32_M5STICK_CP_BLE_IR/BTtoMQTT/FFFF18171423"
value_template: "{{ value_json.rssi }}"
I get the expected result:

But is there a problem with the value_template being ignored for the device_tracker then?
Because the rssi was just an example, what I would really like to do would be to set it home when found, and not_home when a given timeout as passed, but with this new ‘mqtt device tracker’ syntax I can’t seem to find a way to do it!