Riven

Personally I prefer z2m + nodeRed. It’s about as close to bare metal as is practical, and it’s easy to make everything do EXACTLY what you want

In my experience, if you want to use smart home stuff you really need a hub of some sort rather than connecting everything directly to your phone.

Smarthings is popular, or Hubitat for the more tech-savvy. Or just an old PC with HomeAssistant or OpenHAB installed. All have ways to expose their connected devices to HomeKit/Siri.

If you go the old PC route, just make sure not to buy any ZigBee or zWave devices since they’d need additional antenna dongles (built in to the standalone hubs) to function.

I think the idea is to build a habit of checking, so you don’t even need to have that “hold on, am I dreaming?” moment. You just habitually do that thing you always do, and then “oh it seems I’m dreaming. I didn’t notice”