It also demonstrates to a wide, non-technical audience that home networking, and eschewing cloud services is not difficult at all. I have strong hopes for a local-first future.
In fact, I hope, considering how much the EU has been pushing digital sovereignity, I'd love if they introduced some legislation that mandated that any product that could be concievably made to work without a cloud, should be forced to do so.
Half of the home automation crap they are selling phones home to some central server (Tuya I'm looking at you mainly), and there are lot of products like my AC which also only work with a cloud integration which I'm not super comfortable with.
That said, I did some research last year before buying my first robot vacuum. I wasn’t able to find a project - Valetudo included - that would support the bigger, fancier robots made by Roborock etc. If you’re looking to decloud a recent model, I don’t have a good answer.
It's been installed for a few months now, and I bought it specifically to install Valetudo on it.