Sidecar/airdrop/handoff only work some of the time?

On a 2012 MBA running Sequoia 15.1.1 w/8gb ram, all root patches installed. Sometimes, the above features work just fine in conjunction with my M4 iPad (sidecar only works in terms of keyboard + mouse on my iPad, unable to drag windows over), and other times none of them do/sidecar doesn't work despite my Mac recognizing my iPad in terms of handoff working. The iPad doesn't show up under displays in settings, but strangely, it does give me the option to connect to other Macs whenever I'm in public or something. Any reason why this could be happening? I've tried restarting both devices and disconnecting + reconnecting bluetooth and wifi. Sometimes it will just arbitrarily start working as well, but I'm not sure what changed in order for it to do that. Could it be an iCloud issue? Thanks!