Am I on the right path here...

This is partly correct, though you must be careful about what is meant by 'mass'.

Consider a universe containing two stars in orbit. As they orbit, they emit gravitational waves and lose energy (and hence 'mass').

If you take a third 'test' mass far away, you can measure it's gravitational acceleration towards the binary pair, from a fixed distance away from the center of mass of the binary pair.

Over time, the gravitational acceleration of the test mass will DECREASE. This is because the binary star pair is losing energy (and hence mass) to gravitational radiation.

But the rate of energy loss from most objects is far to small to ever be observable.

Bruce