Home assistant + diyhue losing groups on reboot, specified 'rooms' not auto-created

Hello,

Using the diyhue home assistant add on, and trying to specify lights in the homeassistant configuration.yaml as such:

homeassistant:
  customize:
    # Add an entry for each entity that you want to overwrite.
    light.backyard_calla_1_huelight:
      diyhue: include
      diyhue_room: "Backyard"
    light.signify_netherlands_b_v_ltd009_huelight:
      diyhue: include
      diyhue_room: "Hallway"
    light.signify_netherlands_b_v_ltd009_huelight_2:
      diyhue: include
      diyhue_room: "Hallway"
    light.signify_netherlands_b_v_ltd009_huelight_3:
      diyhue: include
      diyhue_room: "Hallway"

The rooms are not created automatically in diyhue as mentioned in the doc… so i go ahead & create the rooms in the hue app, they appear properly and work perfectly until i reboot diyhue. On reboot, the groups are gone but the lights remain available in the app, but unassigned. Sometimes there is an empty ‘group 0’ in the hue app.

Removing the following room customization from the light has no affect

diyhue_room: "Backyard"

the /config/diyhue/groups.yalm file is empty and looks like this:
{}

what am I missing?

thank you so much in advance for any assistance - this project is incredible and i am so thankful of all the effort put by the team & community.