As far as trends in IoT goes, I feel like Tuya is mostly positive. I bought some cheap smart plugs at Costco and the default app was worthless. When I learned that they were Tuya-compatible, I managed to get a half-decent (relative to cost) experience out of them. It seems to me that the alternative are a bunch of unmaintained one-off apps for each fly-by-night manufacturer. With a standard protocol and app I think old devices will live a bit longer at least.
Perfect (better) world it's all open source, but c'est la vie.
Nah, there are options!
HomeAssistant, zigbee2mqtt, ZHA,deCONZ.
The Fingerbot also seems to operate over zigbee? Why would you need a developer account in the first place? And why would anyone but Tuya themselves want to hook into their cloud?
Tuya is just the cloud connector for those devices that communicates with the bridge (so the hardware manufacturers don't need to operate their own servers).