Also, why not make the triggers visible all the time?

If you disarm the trigger behavior, they will show even when not being played.

There are three modes - rig, record, and stream. Triggers work when in "record" or "stream" mode if the Trigger behavior is active. You don't have to be recording, but you do need to be out of "rig" mode. I suspect rig mode has keyboard shortcuts which could conflict with triggers. I have a trigger than I held down before entering record mode and it worked before, during, and after the recording occurred. If you start playing the clip, the recorded value takes over (the keyboard is ignored). It is strange if you are seeing something different - I would double check to see if the trigger behavior is active - maybe it is just doing a playback (which had the trigger recorded)?

Are you using latch with triggers? That might be another thing causing confusion going in and out of record mode with latch triggers maybe?

Or do you mean the problem is in Record mode, the if you don't hold down the trigger key the item disappears (even though it was recorded in the scene as on). This is because the keyboard is controlling the triggers. If you want to see the playback value of the trigger, disable the red dot for the trigger behavior. That red dot is the instruction to CH to use the user's input. Turn that off and it will use the value from the track even when not playing the video back.