That is correct. Any spin of the cranks will wake them up. The LEDs make it easy to diagnose if the issue is one of waking up (or not) or one of re-connection with the head unit. @angel71 confirmed the pedals do wake up, so there’s an issue with re-establishing the (BLE) connection with the (Polar V650) head unit.
I haven’t had any connection/re-connection issues so far. I connect via ANT+ to a Garmin Edge 520 head unit outside, and dual ANT+/BLE to dongles on a Win10 PC to run Zwift and TR inside.