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.