I’ve had very good success with Zigbee stuff, TP-Link Kasa outlets (but I’ve put them on a different router / subnet that doesn’t have Internet access), and ESPHome.

Tuya stuff sucks (keeps disconnecting), JuiceBox (my car charger) changed their app so the integration doesn’t work anymore, and the Aqara zigbee door sensors never worked for me (they pair perfectly, but then disconnect and never come back on).

So yeah, in my experience, once it works, it works, as long as there’s no cloud involved.

It’s a 4.2 inch e-ink screen from waveshare driven by an ESP running ESPHome. Nothing fancy, really. I used to change it “manually”, but the lightbulb moment happened when I realized I had the entities I needed in the HA desktop app.

I have a e-ink screen next to my office door that displays the date, or a warning icon when I’m in a meeting. It uses the “camera in use”/“microphone in use” entity from the desktop app for meeting detection.

My kids really like it.

I’ll second the Zigbee valve, I got mine on AliExpress for about 50$ CAD. It’s a big gray thing with a button on the side, it looks like it’s all the same model. It exposes a switch in HA, on when the water can flow, off when it can’t. Pretty easy to automate.