Yes, the inability of ST to send requests to non-local endpoints is frustrating and somewhat mystifying, and is the reason that driver requires the intermediate “edgebridge” running on a RPi or such.
For now, here’s a simple SharpTools flow to get the status of an individual device. You only need the DeviceID (which you can get from my.smarthings.com by clicking on an individual device in that window and an access token which you can get from SmartThings. Add a little smartness to your things.
This flow can easily be looped to repeat at regular intervals.
ETA: I included the “Set Variable” action only to show the specific value for the $context.response.data variable. You don’t necessarily need to do this.