No such luck. I fiddled and restarted my iPhone and my HomePods and … nothing. I could not get my HomePods to appear as an available accessory in any scene or automation.
Finally I realized that my iPhone needed to be updated to 13.2 (not a painless process as I needed to force restart my iPhone before the update would install).
Once the HomePods were on 13.2.1 and my iPhone on 13.2, everything proceeded apace.
I still can’t get handoff to work correctly, because i suspect the stereo pairing is using the further HomePod that I’m too lazy to walk to to accept the handoff transfers.
Anyway. Apple has strayed pretty far from the ease of the Macintosh, that’s for sure.