Smart home stuff is unfairly maligned. You just need a few basic rules and some hobby time.

• Don’t buy wifi stuff.
• If it needs its own dedicated app, don’t buy it.
• Don’t buy smart appliances. If you want to smart up something expensive, get a cheap smart outlet or a cheap sensor that does the job.
• Use an open source platform like Home Assistant, not Google or Alexa or whatever.
• When you find something it can’t do that you want it to do, write some Python code and make it open source. You’ll get so much love from the community for the simplest things. Also the occasional person that angrily wants to know why your free thing doesn’t support his hyper specific use case but you can safely ignore that.