The hate for the HomeAssistant OS is misplaced. It's just an appliance that manages its own software packages. Like for example the author could have set up Zigbee2MQTT entirely through the web GUI.
Just to be clear, the one paragraph that indirectly references HA was not intended as "hate". It was intended solely as gentle mockery and a bit of humour. I think it should be very clear from the article that my Mosquitto + Z2M + mqttr + bash + jq solution, while feature-complete for my purposes, is not a competitor to HA, which I have never used or tried.
Why have I never tried HA? To run it, I would need to either create a VM or buy dedicated hardware. First, I don't want any more dedicated hardware in my house. Second, I like to keep the number of hosts I need to secure, manage, and keep running to a minimum. Third, from what I've heard (from people insisting it can't run on cheaper SBCs), it's not light; I was genuinely concerned about the server load on my single, low-power home server which already handles other things.
I imagine that for many people, Home Assistant works great: the UI is what they like, it never breaks, and they never have to troubleshoot it. Or, if it does break, they're satisfied with just backing up their configuration and reinstalling it.
But for me, when it comes to things I set up in my own time for my own use, I like to understand everything I am managing so I can quickly understand any failures. If I am going to use a ZBMINIR2 in detached mode to have my smart lights effectively on 100% of the time with the only method of control being Zigbee + glue, the glue had better be: a. rock-solid, b. trivial to troubleshoot, and c. easy to fix. I am not confident that I could learn, and retain, enough knowledge about HA to be able to achieve those three goals.
Lastly, I have extensive experience of DIYing my own solutions to problems for which working off-the-shelf solutions exist. This is not because I am a contrarian who hates everything that works, although maybe there's a tiny bit of that. The reason I didn't use HA wasn't because I hate it; I didn't use it because I wanted the pleasure of solving that problem myself.
As for Home Assistant, I share your sentiment. I run my own stuff because I want to understand my infrastructure (vs. a black box from Philips) and to minimize the amount of code running around.
I'm sure HA is a better opaque box than the commercial ones for many people, but running it would still leave me with the same feeling of having outsourced critical knowledge - plus the compute costs.
I’ll also echo the sibling commenter re: running it for years with no maintenance besides occasionally installing the updates.