Perhaps I never put enough effort into it, but I've slowly coalesced on only having IKEA smart home products after years of acquiring piecemeal stuff and trying to wire it together with Home Assistant. I've shut down HA, and with every non-IKEA "smart" thing I have nowadays I just use the manufacturer's app (though I've become pretty sour on most smart devices overall and avoid them when possible).
I didn't really care for the way it became a sysadmin job where the stakes of a bad update or me not reading some release notes were that my light switches didn't work until I sat there and futzed around with it. I'm a programmer, enjoy Linux admin, run a whole bunch of servers....but having to dive into logs and YAML configs because the lights in my kitchen won't turn off is just not ideal. Similar issues with HomeKit, except when things mysteriously stop working there's even less ability to diagnose, given Apple's design principles that everything "just works", so apparently providing detailed error messages or diagnostics is gauche.
I didn't really care for the way it became a sysadmin job where the stakes of a bad update or me not reading some release notes were that my light switches didn't work until I sat there and futzed around with it. I'm a programmer, enjoy Linux admin, run a whole bunch of servers....but having to dive into logs and YAML configs because the lights in my kitchen won't turn off is just not ideal. Similar issues with HomeKit, except when things mysteriously stop working there's even less ability to diagnose, given Apple's design principles that everything "just works", so apparently providing detailed error messages or diagnostics is gauche.