Zumba and cardio

I don’t know if this helps at all, but I am a 48 year old woman who is 5’4” and weigh 126. I do BollyX, not Zumba, but it’s also a dance based cardio work out and I imagine similar. My Fitbit usually says I burn between 260-315/hr depending on how active the class/dances are that day. I have no idea if that’s accurate, but it feels about right to me with my stats.

The burn is going to be a combination of your weight (do I remember you are quite a big bloke?), your intensity and crucially your fitness level to maintain that intensity for a long duration. But that intensity is actual movement not how it feels to a large degree.

For example if you think of something mundane like climbing stairs.....
A heavier person will burn more calories than a lighter person per flights of stairs climbed.
An unfit person will find stairs more intense than a fit person but the work in the physics sense is the same if they weigh the same.
A fit person can keep on climbing long after and unfit person has to give up or slow right down.

e.g. My office was 8 flights of stairs up from street level. My heavier boss would burn more calories than me for those 8 flights but I could ask for a pay rise after 6 flights knowing he wouldn't have any breath to respond.
As a cyclist I find stairs very easy so could easily keep on chatting normally right up to the 14th floor.
Comparing possible burns for an hour would be very different to comparing for 5 minutes.

Yes you should be eating back exercise calories but if unfit and heavy do expectthem to be exaggerated. 500/hour should be pretty reasonable and more if you have decent cardio fitness.

Not sure if this is helpful, OP, but I use "Aerobics, low impact" as my entry for Zumba (which I love too, although I am NOT good at it!) and the calorie burn (380 for one hour, but I am 37F, 180 lb, and kinda short!) seems to square at least somewhat with reality.

I tend to eat back about 25-50% of my exercise calories and it helps me feel less deprived -- it feels very sustainable and I continue to see progress as long as I plan ahead. If I have a really intense workout, I listen to my body and eat a little bit more than that 50%, but I really never eat all of them back. I use this technique as a bit of an insurance policy against (largely) wild overestimates for calorie burn in MFP's database. Your needs might be different, but I'm just encouraging you to run an experiment on yourself to see how many of those calories you can eat back and still lose (as you're suggesting in your post). Think long-term and search for sustainability: what can you commit to doing with very little struggle and still make forward progress? And be patient while you answer that question -- I have always been too quick to change it up before really examining whether something like that was working, which lead to all-or-nothing thinking and burnout, but now I'm giving myself time to play around with different strategies, and I'm realizing that any slow-down in results I might experience is TOTALLY worth it because I'm finding answers that will help me waaay into the future! That long view is exciting!

Planning ahead is key for me. I really don't ever want to skimp on my workouts, but I usually have a minimum intensity I'm aiming for. So, I think about what my workout is likely to encompass (my main activities are cycling and yoga), then I write down a range of calories (basically, my non-workout calorie allowance plus roughly 25 to 50 percent of my expected calorie burn) that I will shoot to eat in my "Food Notes" field. I work out in the evenings mostly, so I need to make sure the majority of my calorie needs are met by the time I start my workout. And, conversely, I am more motivated to do a quality workout resembling the one I planned because I have basically pre-logged it and planned my day's eating around that.

Sorry to get a little off-track, this just got me thinking about how my approach to this stuff has changed over time. Congrats on your progress so far!