A sitemap is the list of addresses you are willing to show. Drafts, internal files, and a second copy of blog page one do not belong there. robots.txt only says where that map lives.
Which addresses
Home, sections, articles, both languages. Each pair in the map carries alternate links. Blog page one is /blog/, not a separate /blog/page/1/: two addresses with the same list are useless.
lastmod
The date the page actually changed, not “today” on every deploy when the copy did not. A crawler will open the URL anyway. It does not have to trust a hand-written date, and stamping today on the whole site after every release says nothing.
robots.txt
A public site needs Allow and a Sitemap line with the full https address of the file. Do not block CSS and JS: without them a crawler has a harder time reading the page. The map and robots should name the address that actually opens with a valid certificate.
Search Console
Submit the file after it returns 200 and XML. A map helps discovery. It does not promise an index date. You can request the homepage separately once the HTML is the HTML you want in search.
How language pairs sit in that map — the note on hreflang. Why the HTML already contains the text — the note on static sites. To check a file — use the contact form.