basic help - location of synched files via browser/app

I have looked and looked and it seems that it should be easy enough to see my synched files on the browswer AND on the Cloud Storage app on my mac, but I only see them locally in the finder. I hate asking basic questions on "community" forums, so thank you for any help you can offer - places to point me to.

I know my cloud files are synched because I just unpaused synching and I see all local files have a green check (synched) and I see that my cloud storage went up to 14.5 G from 8 (probably that's the number when I stopped synching a while ago). I just want to be sure that I can get all files back if my machine dies - there's something going on with it that IT says means my Mac could die at any minute and of course as a work laptop they won't replace it until it does die and I just need to be sure everything is in all of my cloud storage available (this and OneDrive).

I wanted to be assured that all was accessible - in the cloud and able to come back to a new laptop if necessary - so I looked for my files on the browser access AND the cloud app and you can see in the screenshots that there's nothing there - but you can see that 14.5G of SOMETHING is in the cloud! 🙂 Are they only accessible via local file OR a browser/the app but not both? 

When my Mac dies, will it be as simple as hitting "open synch folder" in the bottom left corner of the cloud app and it'll create a new, local synch folder in my finder? If so, then I guess I'm all good, but it's odd that no files can be seen, rght?

Can anyone help me with this? Thank you!