The author is right the, most current home automation products suck.

The stuff from big brand names is poorly supported, pricey and designed to suck your money away from you.

The cheaper Chinese stuff requires the use of a cloud server located somewhere I don't know and it comes with god knows how many security holes. Plus, the build quality is ropey at best, I clearly remember that time a desk lamp controller in my children's room literally melted.

There are a few devices on the market that don't rely on cloud servers. I have a few plug controllers that you can control via WebSockets or a REST API. I've been dabbling with them for a while and they seem pretty decent. It's just a pity there isn't any off the shelf home automation software that I could use to control them.