This is an aside but since I’m the OP I’m going to take the liberty:
ESPresence has fixed all my presence issues. 100% of the time it works every time. No issues with WiFi sleeping and much faster response times (as in, the lights are on and some soft music playing before I even open the door).
To tie this back to zones, there’s the device_tracker.see service whereby you can manually put a tracker in a zone (so, for example, an ESP32 board sees my phone’s bluetooth and an automation puts me in the home zone).