So went ahead and setup an OTBR container because I am running HA in a container and could not use the add-on. It seems I got it working in short order and paired a bunch of devices.
After some time I restarted the OTBR, and seems I lost the data I needed to connect to the thread network I had created. It might have been my fault when I was trying to bring up the webui or debug some Docker issue, but it involved running all sorts of otbr-ctl command that I didn't understand very well, and I don't think this setup is very robust.
Can someone share some document or video on how to setup OTBR in a container and connect it to HA ?
Now I have to repair all my devices - and get rid of the old network 🙁