Aha -- I didn't see this until now. Double tasking, while updating VS 2019 Enterprise at work, I had time to look this over again.
I'm not seeing the Xamarin Essentials and Xamarin Forms in the Android project. These are in James Montemagno's tutorial screen shot.
OK, this is a bad Android project template? When I try to add the Xamarin references to the project with NuGet Package Manager, they show as already installed.
Here is a screen shot of what I'm seeing. I'm following a tutorial with James Montemagno.
His project in VS 2019 does not have this issue.
I don't have R# so it's not the issue and no other SO articles seen have an answer that clears these.
Have tried deleting and re-adding the references, this doesn't work. I do have the most recent Android project templates. I recall updating a couple of packages from NuGet for the project -- anything that can be updated has been.
As can be seen, the iOS project has no reference issues. The common references between the 2 are just fine in iOS. So the path to them can be found -- likely this is not a path issue.
Any ideas?