Honestly this, the countless "I hacked my [insert here the most random appliance]" every day, e.g. before that on HN https://medium.com/@ivangomezarnedo/how-i-added-a-non-wi-fi-... and the polite arguments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680275 shows me that :

we do need an actual INTERFACE for appliances.

Intellectually speaking it's really cool to "hack" your device, I do it too, but ... we shouldn't have to.

We should be able to interface with hardware on our terms, offline, no proprietary app needed. It could work with the official app, with or without the server of the manufacturer, but it should not have to be the case.

This is sometimes called "the right to interoperate", similar to the right to repair movement. Unfortunately it has been less successful than right to repair so far.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/legislative-path-inter...

Honestly if Tuya just added official support so you could OTA flash their stuff, then between that and ESPHome this would already be done.

If you have physical access (not easy always) it's relatively straight forward to upgrade a Tuya device to be truly local, but they've aggressively tried to shutdown things like Cloudcutter.