Yes, it is insane how these things work. We bought a 60s house which presumably had bad wiring. The sellers elected to use "smart bulbs" and "smart switches" for everything to probably save money on the rewiring cost.

The thing you never realize, is that for each extra communication protocol and endpoint you add, you need to then troubleshoot across all the permutations.

So, if you are only using a wire to connect to another wire, there is only one path that can fail, the wire between them. Electricians are good at troubleshooting that.

If you add a wifi access point, and a smart bulb router (or whatever the fuck it is) and then you add a wifi extender, when things fail, which path did it take when it failed, or when it worked? The permutations you need to troubleshoot are suddenly an N^4 problem. Get your graph theory textbooks out and study up on the traveling salesman problem.

That's why we have had electricians come by who cannot figure out why when we push the wifi light dimmer button in one bedroom, that the other bedroom lights turn off. It just started happening a few months back. It's absolutely maddening.

All these smart devices are awful. As a related aside, our Amazon Ring devices no longer allow you to connect to their wifi with the Amazon Ring app, and we have a bunch of cameras that are dead once the power goes off. Used to be you could just join their temp wifi connection, register the device on the home wifi, and go. They turned that off. Now, they all say you need to get the QR code, but we cannot find that on the devices, so they are bricked. I'm sure this is because probably someone found an open wifi Ring camera, added it using their phone when they walked by, and spied on the family. But, I don't really care, I just know cameras are sitting there unusable by me, until some hacker walks by and figures out how to register them. I won't be spending anymore money on Amazon cameras, but I'm sure Amazon would be happy to have me just buy new ones.