Chayula Monk - Anyone gotten the Chayula Part to Work?

I last played POE in 2015 and was a pretty good build maker. I really enjoy getting a concept and then making it work. With POE2 all over the news I thought it would be fun and picked up the EA. Reading through the available info pre-launch I decided I was gonna play some kind of Ice/Chaos Monk Life/ES Hybrid. And while my build is actually effective - Level 75 doing level 6 maps safely and it is great for bosses with such high Freeze Buildup and Freeze Duration - I feel like the Chayula part of my build is basically non-existent.

The Good: loving the GhosteWraith/Chayula's Gift Combo. 85% chaos resist with ease and a super large ES pool is awesome. Also makes Grim Feast Sweet as I run around maps with a crap ton of ES so when I do run into trouble rares I do so with 6k ES.

The Bad: everything else Chayula. Mana Leech/ES instant - I can't for the life of me get this to be impactful. I play Ice, but a lightning would have the same issue is that a lot of your physical damage is converted and only phys leeches. I did everything possible to amp the 20% that is physical and amping up mana leech (gloves, weapon, gem on Ice strike) with a beastly weapon it just doesn't work well math says it should work way better - ES moves barely and I still need mana pots which makes no sense with that level of investment into it. I do not know if this is impacted by bugs or it just sucks.

Reality Rending - dunno if this is even working. It doesn't show on the hit effects or impact tooltip DPS and I have played turning it off and on I can't tell the difference. It's on now as there is nowhere else to put my points

Embrace the Darkness: The benefits aren't even close to being worth giving up Spirit.

Breach/Flames of Chayula: Played with it for 30 minutes. Dear god what an awful mechanic. I wanna fight things not chase flames on the ground. 10 seconds duration is just too much micro managing and they are really bad on bosses since you kind of need to change screens or move screens to get more.

Again - my build is really effective there just isn't much Chayula about it even with 6 ascendency points. They could disappear and it would be about the same. Anyone having any better luck?