I’m glad you’re making some progress. And again, I apologize for any earlier confusion. 
As far as Amazon Alexa routines, at the present time, you cannot use any switch of any brand as the “If.“ Only as the “then.“
If I had to guess, I would guess that this is because many switches sold by Amazon do not report their status back when physically changed at the wall, and Amazon doesn’t want the customers to be unhappy with brands that don’t that don’t work in Alexa routines The way other brands do. And explaining all of that would be a customer support nightmare.
So they made the decision to only allow sensors as triggers.
(An if/then statement, whether it’s in IFTTT, an Alexa Routine, SmartThings, or wherever, has a “trigger” and a “target.” The trigger could be time of day, voice command, a different device changing state, or many other options. It’s up to the designers of the rules engine as to what’s allowed. But if a device doesn’t report its changing state to the platform, then it can’t be used as a trigger.)
The advantage we have as smartthings users is that it is possible to create a virtual device which is both a switch and a sensor. You can turn the switch on and off just like any switch. When you turn it on, the sensor looks like it’s open. When you turn it off, the sensor looks like it’s closed. So this is a very common way of being able to use Alexa routines from SmartThings. You do everything you want to on the smartthings side and then you turn on the Virtual switch which makes the virtual sensor look like it opened. And you use that virtual sensor as the trigger for your Alexa routine. 
Again, this is a very popular method. For details, see the community FAQ. (The topic title is a clickable link)