Cut the Clutter: Ignore Files Feature is now live

I never signed up for a beta so I guess this has been rolled out to everyone now? Amazing either way. Been waiting/hoping for this ever since I started using Dropbox 😅

Ref. the reply here: Cut the Clutter: Ignore Files Feature is now live | The Dropbox Community

Is this very rigid at the moment? Why must it be done in that exact order to work? I'm asking because I came here ready to complain this feature absolutely did not work at all, only to actually manage to get it working using the exact steps listed there. I promise I tried this at least 5 times before coming here. I have no idea what I did differently, but most of my attempts involved editing the ignore file while Dropbox was either not running or syncing was paused, because I thought that would be the correct approach. But no matter how many times I tried restart Dropbox or my computer or deleting the folders it did not work.

So apparently you MUST have Dropbox running and syncing enabled while making changes to the file for it to work?

1. And even though the ignoring seems to work as expected now Dropbox still immediately lists thousands of files as syncing every time I start a new project (Unity project with all cached/temporary folders set to be ignored). Why is that? Hovering over the tray icon seems to indicate it's not actually syncing (uploading/download), only indexing? It must do that part even though the folders are ignored?
2. And previously I had always set Dropbox to pause syncing while I had a Unity project open because it could cause problems with the Unity editor while it was running, and Dropbox was never able to sync the 2 "lock files" while the project was open anyway and it was annoying to constantly see the sync icon never go away. I see that last part has not changed, even though the lock files are inside a folder that is correctly being ignored. Is that the same reason as above? It's not actually trying to sync them, but just index them?

Either way I'll probably still pause syncing while I work inside Unity just to be save, but it's nice to finally have a single general file that automatically ignores all files/folders I want.