Smart Sync is experiencing an issue

I work on a team of 7 people, in which 5 people have issues with smart sync.

I am one of the 2 where Smart sync behaves as expected: when you double click an online only file, it opens instantly. 
I use 3 computers and 2 Dropbox accounts (the business and the personal), and for me, it works as expected in all of them (Big Sur and Catalina OS).

My other colleagues need to right click and select "local" before opening a file. 

If they try to double click it, they will get an error message. (attached)

This becomes incredibly annoying when working with Indesign documents that have hundreds of links inside. 

My colleagues need to go file by file clicking to make local (or make huge project folders (50gb plus) available local.

We already contacted Dropbox support and the suggestion was to reinstall the app, then they closed the ticket.

The IT department of our studio also tried all sorts of troubleshooting without success.

we did all of these:

logout dropbox, restart, login dropbox
uninstall old dropbox with app cleaner
install new dropbox
tweak configurations of dropbox (activate and desativate extensions on mac permissions)
uninstall indesign
install older version of indesign

install most recent version of indesign

none of these steps solved anything. 

I am currently reading all posts with similar problems trying to find a solution we didn't try yet and posting this message in all of them so other people can follow the journey.

can anybody help us with this incredibly annoying issue.

thanks