I got into it last year. It’s been less intuitive to configure - especially the dashboard section -without getting into manual configuration. It desperately needs some improvement to make it so that a “lightweight” tech person like me can configure it as much as I want without learning the gritty shit under the hood. That said, I’m happy with it overall and am slowly learning more in spite of that complaint.
Google home, apple home, etc are pretty sad once you want to do anything more than very basic automation or very basic controls. Considering that you are giving them complete access to your home and devices that’s a nonstarter for me. I’d go back to having all “dumb” stuff without something like HA. Plus there are things those corpo tools won’t let you do. I couldn’t control the fan on my oven hood manually with google home, but in HA I have total control right out of the box.
Not that this graph needs to be taken that seriously, but it should really cite the source for those hourly wage averages. For the US at least that looks too optimistic, guessing its true for other nations as well. Assuming the top 1% are eliminated to avoid deeply poisoning the data, I’d guess that the average hourly would be under 20usd/hr and the hours-to-80-USD number will wind up well over 4.