I don’t like this story. The outcome is only accidentally good and what the author seems to miss entirely is the elephant in the room: A crass failure to communicate with the developers. If you try to establish something like KPIs (not commenting on if that is good or bad here) you need to talk to the team and get them on board. If you treat them like lab rats and try to measure individual performance from the outside that is an obvious fail. In the end, where they state that they “quietly” dropped it, indicates that the real lesson was not learned.
Uh, and a dilbert comic.
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.