Hello John,
I've checked the example and it works fine on my machine with S32DS 2018.R1. Could you possibly provide us with more info about the debugger issues? can you check what is the OpenSDA firmware version on your board?

Regarding differences in the header file. I agree this is indeed inconvenient especially in case of existing examples on nxp community.
The ideal case is to have all the examples published updated and tested with latest version of the tools. This currently works only for examples available in S2DS (New project from Example)
Stan