You can speed this bit up by manually triggering jobs::BadgeGrant from your /sidekiq/scheduler page (for those with access). Mine ran 3 hours ago, but it will differ from site to site.
If you didn’t mind just having them in a regular old topic you could create a new one and add the link to it to your tos url admin setting so it shows up in the tabs still. You could then grant a badge quite easily based on people viewing that topic (though your experiments with published pages may also bear fruit as well 
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I think to do it the same as the Read Guidelines one you’d need to create a plugin to replicate the behaviour for the ToS (not my forte though, so take that with a pinch of salt 
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This is a required custom field, which I think works out quite nicely for that. Though you only say you’ve read them rather than actually reading them, so it may depend on what the main thrust of granting the badge is for.