how do I ensure my machine is taking the bed mesh into account?

[last wadi]

stick some tape around your leadscrews and see them turning while printing. If they are, then the bed mesh is working. If they are staying still, no bed mesh

[warped silo]

I had the same issue, you can actually see if the mesh is being applied in the interface.

This is without a heightmap loaded:

and this is with a loaded heightmap

To make sure my heightmap was loaded every print, I added this:

[gcode_macro _USER_START_PRINT_BED_MESH]
gcode:
BED_MESH_PROFILE LOAD="default"

to printer.cfg

But I did that because I do not re-probe every time

this does of course require that you have a heightmap probed and saved under the name "default"