TSA shaping file doesn't seem to update?

The “what I posted above” thing is not super clear so I’ll try to explain better, but using kcli is your best option.
If kcli does not suit you, and you actually want to selectively trigger, you could potentially (untested) use a match everything regex in the default shaping rules. Eg:

[["default".automation]]  
regex = ".*"  
action = "Suspend"  
duration = "1 hour"

I can confirm that it works. It generated a suspension that I could see here: http://localhost:8008/get_suspension_v1/suspended.json