I got a working solution for the Firestore dates. At least it appears to work, I am in no way an expert.
The problem was Retool sends any date object as a string to a Firestone query that then gets entered into Firestore as a string. Some workarounds involved setting the date object in the Value box. But this wasn't a good solution for me.
By using Raw mode I was able to combine an object with my key/values from another query with a timestamp object.
I also wanted the return data to be the same value as the GUI mode.
I changed to the .add method and then had to modify the new returned data with the transformer to format the return to look like the GUI mode.