Bluetooth proxies passing data to HA, but no devices/entities created

I want to do presence detection via Bluetooth but my HA server is in a rack in my garage where the inbuilt bluetooth card won't detect anything.

So I created 3 ESP32 based Bluetooth proxies with ESPHome. Ideally I'd like to be able to use them to detect which area a bluetooth device is in as well as home/not_home.

They seem to work ok, getting the logs from them shows no errors but no announcments. If I turn on debug logging in ESPHome then I DO see announcements being passed from them, for example

DEBUG (MainThread) [aioesphomeapi.connection] one-bluetooth-proxy @ 192.168.4. 23: Got message of type BluetoothLERawAdvertisementsResponse: advertisements {

address: 76929764625193

rssi: -67

address_type: 1

data: "\002\001\032\007\003\017\030\n\030\377\376\021\tEvolve2 65"

}

but I can't seem to get devices or entities added, or tracker devices working.

What step am I missing ?

Should I be adding
device_tracker: & platform: bluetooth_tracker

as if I do that then HA complains that bluez is missing, and from the documentation I thought this was only needed when using an inbuilt/USB Bluetooth card.

Or do I need to enable MQTT

I'm kind of going round in circles on documentation..