For me, it's simply grouping lights. Example: in the winter months if I'm waking up to take out my dogs, it's pitch black on the main floor, so a command like

For me, it's simply grouping lights. Example: in the winter months if I'm waking up to take out my dogs, it's pitch black on the main floor, so a command like "Alexa, good morning" will turn on the lights for the path that I need to get to the back door and tell me what the outside temperature is so I can wear the appropriate coat. The second most important use case for us (pre-pandemic era) was to have lighting routines that made it look like we were home while away on vacation. I started with some wifi devices (WeMo) but eventually migrated to Z-wave, and found them to be much easier to setup and maintain (and generally more reliable) than wifi (ymmv, of course). My Z-wave hub is basically a USB Z-wave stick connected to an old NUC that's running OpenHAB in a Docker container. I rarely log into it or do any maintenance on it other than when I add new devices, which is almost never. I chose OpenHAB over HomeAssistant (YMMV) because I found it to be easier to write a couple of basic scripts to handle state notifications for my smart locks. I had been on SmartThings which was fine prior to getting smart locks and then turned into a major pain afterwards (one firmware update basically broke all my integrations, forcing me to do everything all over again). Keep in mind, I didn't really go so far as automating everything "just because I can". 100+ nodes (as in the article) in a home situation just seems bonkers to me.