I built my own smart home set up before Alexa et al came along and later switched to Alexa because my wife and, later kids, took priority. My experiences with commercial smart home solutions is that they require just as much babysitting as anything you build yourself. The only real benefit of commercial solutions is that my wife isn’t afraid to add plugs et al to the smart home infrastructure whereas before it would be entirely down to me. But the cost I pay for that convenience is reduced privacy and potentially insecure hardware connected via WiFi.

Honestly, if I was building something out again, I would totally optimise the set up for privacy and security rather than convenience of having a spouse connect new devices.