I added a ratgdo to my garage door, and I don't know why I waited so long

Left out is a bit of the saga of ratgdo and that it's not actually open source hardware. There is a separate effort in that space - https://github.com/Kaldek/rat-ratgdo

I have no issues with closed hardware and making money. However, the ratgdo maintainer will actively delete any references to other alternatives which I think is poor form and leaves a bad taste. Especially since his product relies so heavily on other open-source such as esphome, as well as the Security+2.0 protocol work that is out there (eg. https://github.com/argilo/secplus )

> Of course, while the ratgdo is indeed a local device, there’s still a large and obvious cloud dependency in my home automation setup: HomeKit itself.

HomeKit works on the local network, it is per design not using “the cloud”. Only if you are not on your local network, it’ll use iCloud to communicate with a bridge (AppleTV / HomePod mini) that is on the local network.