Putting this question and my answer here to maybe save someone else some frustration.

I was unable to get the original Orbbec Astra camera working on our Turtlebot2 system working under ROS 2. After numerous attempts at finding solutions and using several different forks of the astracamera, ros2astracamera, and openni2camera that refused to recognize my camera. I finally found a working solution with an older version of OpenNI 2.3 SDK. I created a fork of openni2_camera linking to this code, and it is now working.

See https://github.com/CNURobotics/openni2_camera if you have this problem with the older Astra camera under ROS 2. This is tested under Foxy on Ubuntu 20.04, with plans to test under Galactic and Humble shortly.

Feel free to chime in if I missed something, and you have a better solution.