I guess I would next try to use BLHeli passthrough and try doing the ESC throttle calibration though that... though, you mention SimonK -- so maybe you haven't reflashed those ESC's to BLHeli. I suppose that could be it as well. I'm not nearly as familiar with SimonK firmware, but I recall that they also had the ability to configure the option to perform throttle range calibration or not. Perhaps the version of the SimonK firmware you've got on those ESC's either have it disabled, or it's somehow incompatible with how cleanflight sends the throttle signal from the UI... which seems like it would be a really odd thing I've never heard of.
If you're adventurous, you may want to consider flashing the more popular BLHeli firmware, but there's quite a lot to it if you're not familiar with it and some amount of risk for permanent damage (and fire) if you mess up.
BTW, I also have the Illuminati naze32 with the integrated minimOSD (running the latest scarabOSD software) on an airframe and I am currently running Betaflight 3.1.7 on it, but have had 3.2.4 on it. I backed out so that I could have access to blheli passthrough, which was removed for the naze32 targets in 3.2.x