I originally defined the dropdown helpers for the washer and dryer states to have the state "Unknown" at Home Assistant start-up. I rarely restart Home Assistant because of things like power failures or hardware maintenance, but I frequently restart it for software updates. In those scenarios, it's more useful to remember the state instead of resetting it to "Unknown". Making that change was just a matter of deleting the "initial:" configuration from those input_select definitions. There's no UI for that, so the edit has to happen manually in config/.storage/input_select.