No need to worry, you haven’t said anything wrong or impolite at all! What you’re saying makes sense, that if the file has not been downloaded to the local device (and therefore has only the placeholder in the folder), then it might not trigger a KM macro. I honestly never tested it, because I have always kept my cloud content on my local drive as well.
FWIW, I hardly use iCloud Drive, for the reasons stated in my comment on this post. 