macOS File Provider not installed by default and needlessly erases and downloads files twice

Sorry, that's not what I meant. Time Machine seems to have worked just fine and originally restored all Dropbox files to the proper location, ~/Library/CloudStorage.

Then when installing Dropbox, Dropbox proceeded to remove all the files, restart Dropbox back in the older location pre-file-provider, ~/Dropbox, then redownload all my files. This was unnecessary and redundant. All this time it was prompting me to turn on the file provider, which I couldn't do because it was downloading files.

Then a few hours later, once all files were re-downloaded, I re-enabled the macOS-specific Dropbox file provider implementation, which then moved everything back to ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox, and then synced again.

I think this is a bug and Dropbox should actually install the macOS file provider by default and just verify the files are synced, instead of moving/deleting/restoring/moving/syncing again.

As far as status, all seems well now. It just took hours of needless downloading and confusion.

As for this assertion: "can't use Time Machine with Cloudstorage" ... This doesn't appear to be true. I can verify in the Time Machine backup that all Dropbox files in ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox are present and accessible.