Fantastic organization of best practice notes across various talks! This is exactly what I was looking for in terms of seeing more details after watching the 2018 Android Summit discussion, Fun with LiveData.

I understand the need for creating getter and setter points for LiveData in the ViewModel. However, I am looking to understand how the get() syntax works.

ie:

val isRealtime: LiveData<Boolean>
    get() = _isRealtime
private val _isRealtime = MutableLiveData<Boolean>()

Here is a good explanation on Stackoverflow: How Does Android LiveData get() syntax work?

get() is not related to Android.

val isRealtime: LiveData<Boolean>
    get() = _isRealtime

Here, get() is overriding the automatically-generated Kotlin getter function for the isRealtime property. So, instead of returning its own value, it returns the value of _isRealtime.
Personally, I recommend simpler syntax:

private val _isRealtime = MutableLiveData<Boolean>()
val isRealtime: LiveData<Boolean> = _isRealtime

The objective of either of these is to keep the mutability private, so consumers of this class do not accidentally update the MutableLiveData themselves.

I find this method the best - mainly because less typing (better working code completion)

private val mutableLiveData = MutableLiveData<State>()
val liveData = _liveData.asLiveData()

fun <T> MutableLiveData<T>.asLiveData() = this as LiveData<T>

More ways here

"And also, it's exposing a MutableLiveData. Almost ... You should almost never do this." I'm not so sure about this, for one time shots, for example when wanting to show an error Toast or similar it's handy to have a public mutableLiveData(null) in your ViewModel which is observed in your activity, when you set the value the observer can show the error and then set the value to null, instead of calling another function of the ViewModel to reset the value which I would find to be too much of an overhead for nothing. And this is actually also being done in Google's codelab "Advanced Coroutines"