

Matter is also local—provisioning can be a PITA but once done I’ve been pretty happy with even the cheap Matter WiFi smart bulbs. Home Assistant supports them very well.
Cheap bulbs can be a little buggy, which usually means I need to power cycle some of them now and then.



Regarding DNS servers, what router do you have? Some routers have simple enough DNS capabilities — I have a MikroTik, and have it set up with DNS entries for internal services (including wildcard). Publicly accessible services just use my registrar’s DNS (namecheap — no complaints).