It seems like they put a lot of effort into presidential runs and that doesn't seem like a very good use of time?
The presidential runs aren't an attempt to gain power by being elected to office. They are a propaganda campaign to spread a socialist platform. The campaign process itself is an opportunity to have tens or hundreds of thousands of conversations about our socialist platform. The amount of votes in the election are an interesting metric, but not a key objective.
we see PSL folks at actions but we don't see them integrating as much into the logistics or trying to elevate the struggle.
This is actually absurd. The PSL has been organizing in the struggle for Palestinian liberation for decades. They were organizing demonstrations on October 8th while almost everyone else was still condemning Hamas. They've organized like 5 mass protests on Washington. I don't know what your local scene looks like, but the PSL is the most important socialist org that is organizing for Palestinian liberation on a national scale.
The PSL split from a party that was, many decades ago, a Trot party. But the PSL itself has never been a Trot party (split memes notwithstanding), and that history is pretty irrelevant to what the party is today.
The PSL doesn't really bother to have "a line" on Trotsky or Stalin. Rather, it correctly eschews that "great person" framing of history and instead analyses the historical material conditions of the Soviet Union etc. It's certainly not "anti-Stalinist" like Trots always are; nobody is going to look at you strangely for speaking positively of Stalin.