The state of the environment that the IoT device is sensing or controlling, has to match local reality. Therefore, the state that's actually on the IoT's MCU is the true state that matters. (Any state stored cloud-side could be stale if the MCU is disconnected, or misses updates) Ergo, if the cloud service is showing or manipulating the state of the IoT device, it has to read or command the IoT in near realtime, implying some kind of constant/realtime connection.
This would be the same mechanism a local-first connection would use, right? What am I missing here?