My only smart home devices are old "Philips" Wiz Wi-Fi bulbs. They were cheap and I could set them up to change color temperature and brightness to help me fall

My only smart home devices are old "Philips" Wiz Wi-Fi bulbs. They were cheap and I could set them up to change color temperature and brightness to help me fall asleep and wake up on time - it really seems to help. But they were hard to pair and every few months they'll disconnect from WiFi and need re-pairing. The proprietary app is somewhat annoying and they released a new V2 app which is more annoying and (from what I can tell) doesn't have any widgets or siri shortcuts so I need to launch the app every time I want to turn the lights on or off. I'm sure some newer WiFi bulbs work better but by nature they have to use the cheapest possible WiFi hardware and I'm wary of them clogging up my airwaves, forcing low PHY rates, and being incompatible with newer WiFi technologies like U-APSD. My new LG TV has a built-in Matter Thread hub, so Thread sounded perfect. No proprietary apps needed, compatible with everything. Just point your phone at the QR code to pair. Fully local, low-latency mesh networking. But it's new so the devices are more expensive and there's a really limited selection. The early-adopters of Thread experienced some reliability issues but those have been fixed (?) I can't find much info about LG's Thread hub implementation but it seems like I'd need to add new devices through LG's app and I'm wary about how LG's integrations tend to be unreliable and how they try to turn open standards into de-facto lock-in experiences. Zigbee and Z-Wave felt like old news to me. The last vestiges of the semi-open proprietary home automation market for people who are already locked in and willing to pay $60 for a light switch. I really don't want to have to buy a hub. I also had some bad experiences with some very expensive ZigBee wireless relay modules I used in a product at work. I think this thread is causing me to rethink ZigBee. Cheap, open, compatible. I wanted to get a low-power always-on server to host the Grafana/MQTT for my Open Airgradient air sensor anyway, so I may as well plug a Zigbee dongle in and run Home Assistant. Might get a Home Assistant Green or Yellow.