The heart of my smarthome is currently the HE C-8. I have mostly Zwave devices, since that's what I chose as the primary protocol for gear when I started building my mesh about a decade ago. At the time, 2.4ghz was extremely busy here, and I was a little concerned about adding Zigbee in to already-crowded spectrum. I also didn't want to consider wifi devices because I didn't trust them (and with a lot of manufacturers, rightly so). Fast forward to today, though, and I'm in a slightly less crowed environment. Most of the equipment I care about in terms of connectivity has moved from 2.4ghz wifi to 5ghz and even 6ghz. I've also created a specific vlan for devices which need wifi but I don't trust to be able to see the rest of my network or the Internet at large. I've also purchased a couple of Zigbee products (mostly light bulbs) over the last couple of years. I also have dipped my toes into Lutron Caseta and Kasa. So I want to keep my options open.
Anyway, I have a few Inovelli plug-in zwave dimmers which have worked well, but I'm starting to have issues with them. So far as I can tell, the "smart" part of them works fine. They communicate with my HE just fine, but one of them seems to have a failure of the a/c switching part of their circuitry (haven't cracked it open yet to see if it looks like a relay or mosfet or whatever). So, I need to replace it along with another two which seem to have issues with switching gear after a power outage until I unplug/replug them. I was planning to go zwave again, since that's probably the strongest mesh I have in the house, but with zigbee still being an option, thread and matter out there and gaining momentum, and even decent wifi options being something I'm willing to trust, should I be looking at options other than zwave?
Just to include more details, the core of my smarthome is my C-8, but we have a mixed protocol home. Generally, I have the HE be the one that talks to the hardware, but I do use Google Homes all over the house for voice control and I have an Apple TV setup to act as the Homekit hub through the HE's Homekit integration. Making this all work together can be a chore at times, but it does work. You might say pick a dang camp, but I've never been happy going all in on a platform. I carry both and android phone and an iPhone. I literally use Macs, Windows, and Linux almost every day (both at home and work), so yeah, I'm crazy. But in the end, I just need it to work, especially when it comes to making sure it works every time for my wife. Maybe matter will eventually be the one to rule them all, especially if it can give me the ability to control everything locally like Homekit. I hate relying on the cloud to connect to our Google Homes.