They do "directly work with Home Assistant;" your computer just didn't have the hardware to communicate with them. You bought the dongle which is just a Zigbee

They do "directly work with Home Assistant;" your computer just didn't have the hardware to communicate with them. You bought the dongle which is just a Zigbee modem that allowed Home Assistant to talk to the bulbs using ZHA (which is built-in to Home Assistant). Zigbee is the hardware wireless protocol that Hue uses.