Apple Home app - how to backup/restore settings?

iCloud considers itself “the source of truth” and restores its data to its non-obvious locations on your Mac. It has never done me any good to restore iCloud data from one of my own backups, because iCloud simply overwrites those locations itself.

I believe you may have to restore your own backups to an alternate location on your Mac, let iCloud do its thing, and then move “your files” to their desired location.