As best as I can tell, Sensibo and Cielo do not know the current state of your mini-splits.
If you have a schedule to set the units on/off and someone in your house inadvertently uses the remote to toggle the on/off state, all your subsequent schedule triggers will be off — for instance an “off” action you create in the Cielo app will turn ON a mini-split that’s already off, because it’s only a basic, binary toggle.
Obviously this is annoying, so I’ve been researching for controls that are smarter. I have no experience with Kumo but I think I’d switch if I knew it had this functionality. Does anyone have any recommendations?
The D1 minis or any esp8266 based device will work, you just need to use a bidirectional logic level converter. The units communicate on 5v levels and all esp based devices use 3.3v levels. Some ESP devices might be more tolerant of using 5v on their GPIO pins but none of them really support it.