I liked having the full Hue ecosystem because it meant that I could tinker with HomeAssistant and the lights wouldn’t stop responding during restarts. I also already have a cloud account from the pre-HA days so that’s no big change for me but…
I think he's talking about having a bridge separate from home assistant vs using the zha integration. The former setup will let you control your lights when home assistant is down, the latter will not.
I just moved from the former to the latter and it's life changing lol. Added bonus of moving to z2m is binding devices directly to other devices inputs, like switches and motion sensors.
I just got a Filohome (tuya) dual switch and used tuya-cloud cutter put ESPHome on it. When setup with ESPhome it will still work even if HA is unreachable ok WiFi is down. I never even downloaded their app, made an account, or signed in.
Note for anyone trying to do the same, the Filohome triple switch device in tuya-cloudcutter will work to load the initial boot firmware but you need to change the yaml config when you install ESPHome. If anyone wants the yaml file let me know.