Hi. I managed to find a solution that will surprise you. I get OneDrive to work just as I wanted it to. Not only that, but it let me use external removable drives as well.
I now know that using an external removable drive non-APFS and non-case-sensitive is possible and works just fine. Furthermore, it is Microsoft that decided to exclude this function, not Apple.
I disconnected all account and deleted the current version (august 2023) of the standalone onedrive app. In other words, a clean wipe.
I got my hands on an old onedrive standalone version (January 2021). Interestingly, immediately after finishing the installation the app will allow you to use almost any (removable) drive to place the sync folder into. Once chosen an removable drive, you can add another account to another removable drive whenever you want!
When chosen a non-APFS drive, onedrive will show you a message/windows stating that the sync folder is placed on an non-compatible non-APFS drive, recommending to change the formatting and “upgrade” the synced folder.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to know what would change. While placed on the GUID-ExFat SSD, Onedrive did what was expected. It synced files downloading them onto the drive.
However, when using an GUID-APFS drive, Onedrive (even this old version), places what appears to be a Symlink folder onto the drive and creates a “Cloudstorage” folder in the the operating system’s Library folder. That last one appears to serve as a cache folder. For some reason, and without me having chosen to, OneDrive used the ondemand philosophy to just download files a tried to open while the rest of the files were just referencing symlinks.
I prefer the old way of having a synced local folder. I don’t want an optimized form of on-demand files.
And I definitely won’t move my home directory folder.
I hope this comment might help someone that just wants the plain old simple way of syncing and using cloud storage.
