The Phillips bridge has worked basically perfectly for a decade, and works entirely locally. So everyone with Philips bulbs just used the bridge apis from home assistant amd the app.

Up until extremely recently, no one had any will or motivation to make home assistant or anything like it work nicely with the bulbs without a hub. Why put the effort in if the bridge already solves all the problems and locally?

Obviously that has changed and I'm sure some people are trying to figure out how to make this all work nicely without a bridge, but it's going to take time. Maybe a long time. I wouldn't expect it to work well soon.

Tip for Australians.

Now that internet connection and account is required you can get a refund on all devices, regardless of age.

Also make sure to complain to the ACCC while you are at it.

I have a conbee stick and pretty much everything works fine, without any noticable delay with ZHA. Maybe the hub is operating on a different channel with less interference? It is possible to switch channels in HA, but it requires re-pairing of all devices, so I've never dared to try that.

The Home Assistant has gone a long way towards user friendliness, but despite the fact, it's still not even close.

I haven't bought a new hue bulb in a while and when these last ones break or burn out I'll not be buying hue replacements.

I was in the same boat as you, OP. Bunch of Hue products on a Hue bridge, and I switched to Home Assist using the same Sonoff dongle. I installed HA on my NAS in a VM. There was definitely a learning curve, but I was impressed by how quickly Z2M detected my devices. All of my bulbs and a motion sensor are working perfectly, and I have disconnected the Hue bridge. The only device I need to configure is a dimmer switch that I had paired to my livingroom lights. I think that I have to do that manually.

I’ve been using HA for a years or two now and still found Zigbee stuff difficult to troubleshoot :-)

I don't actually own a Hue bridge and have never used one in my setup, but have about a dozen Hue bulbs (and additional non-Hue bulbs when "budget" options would suffice). I have HA running in Docker on my NAS and Z2M running in Docker on a Pi4 (which also is running my Z-Wave container) placed in a more central location in my house, which has a Sonoff Zigbee. They communicate with each other via gigabit Ethernet. Altogether I have about 50 Zigbee devices on my network.

It did take a bit to get everything set up and communicating with each other, and I specifically chose Zigbee channels that don't overlap with my WiFi (since they're both 2.4ghz). But my light response is essentially instantaneous via my HA app or a bound smart switch, so it's definitely doable without a bridge using existing tech.

The Philips TOS change was the reason I got into Home Assistant. I have the Sonoff ZBdongle-P, which was pre-flashed and uses ZHA. I had an absolutely flawless experience in using that instead of the Hue Bridge so far. Sure, the initial setup took a while but now the lights work without any hiccups whatsoever. Some lights which had problems connecting to the grid with the Hue Bridge before now work even better. Sorry to hear about your experience.

About Home Assistant in general, a lot of research was involved until I got the basics of automation, sensor setup and yaml configuration. I'm controlling stuff like a weather station, my espresso machine states, TV and Amp, and a bunch of environmental sensors. Some of the concepts can feel a little odd at first, but I'm very happy how the whole system turned out. I used OpenHab in the past and that was a much, much worse experience.

Huh.. I've had really good experience with z2m and an El cheapo stick from China (~7 dollars)

I'm not using it with home assistant though, using node red for "smarts"