Sync v Shortcut to OneDrive. What's the difference?

John Sellarsand others, what I've come to realize is:

The sync and shortcut functions work the same. Only the menu gets downloaded to File Explorer, and individual files are downloaded as accessed.

The difference is...sync is slightly more device specific. If you are syncing files, the files work back and forth between the device you're syncing to and the cloud. On my laptop, synced folders appear in my file explorer as a separate list. If I edit a synced file, it syncs to the cloud. If I work on a document in the cloud, it syncs to my laptop computer. For a time -- documents that aren't accessed eventually stop being synced. Fortunately, the little icon by the file name changes to reflect the unsynched state.

Shortcut works the same, except the "shortcut" folders appear as shortcuts in OneDrive and thus are accessible anytime you are accessing OneDrive, from any device.

It's not what I expect. I expect synched files to always be being synced. And I expect shortcuts to be shortcuts to where the files live online -- and I expect I need to be online to access them. So in rolling these functions out, Microsoft is changing the meaning of both sync and shortcut. They are basically merging the functions.