I'm glad these days one can just get a Zigbee button for 5$, and connect it to Home Assistant without internet connection required. I refuse to buy anything that has a mandatory dependence on cloud services.
At the same time that’s great… for you or I. To someone grabbing “a button to do a thing” on the shelf at Best Buy, Home Assistant might not be where it needs to be for them.
The only reason this actually comes to mind is my own experience updating my HA instance recently. I’m not a big HA user - I only control 3 bulbs and a BedJet and a Yale smart lock, and expose it back to HomeKit to my Apple devices. But even something simple as an HA update can cause integrations to break or require additional behind-the-scenes repairs that an end user just would be too confused to do.
You or I can sit down and understand that the error message means we need to reconnect our Yale integration’s OAuth after a HA upgrade, then figure out that it didn’t work, then figure out that we had to delete and re-add the whole integration, but will Bob and Jill figure it out just as easily in half an hours’ time?
About half the people I know who dabbled in “smart home” tech have a half-working remnant that they can’t be arsed to fix, but isn’t annoying enough to replace.
So it just kind of works somewhat.
I’m even in that boat; and part of it is a Home Assistant that is somewhat still connected, enough.
