My govee lights are the bane of my smart home. I've tried 3 different ways of integrating them and really only Govee2MQTT has been working for me but it's really delayed. Wish I had known about zigbee and HA before redoing our basement's lighting.
Edit to answer your actual question: I had to use the govee app a ton before Govee2MQTT and it still is the only non HA integration that's directly hooked up with Google.
My Chromecast slowly stopped turning on the sound system and TV via CEC so instead of buying a new one, my family knows there's a red button in the theater room. It cuts the power to the Chromecast via a smart switch and then power cycles the TV and sound system. Saved us $100 and the world some e-waste.
I use Gatus in conjunction with http APIs for health checking. For services that don't support that, you can always pattern match the HTML code.