I have 2 of the Lifx bulbs, so not a representative sample, I feel. I'm not a big user of Bulbs and don't expect that to change. But my thoughts on them are:
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On one hand, a smart bulb is a smart bulb. Zwave, Zigbee, WiFi or some future Matter product, they will all consume RF. A WiFi bulb's consumption is going to be significantly smaller that Zigbee or Zwave. Let's assume the bulb needs less than 100 bytes to do something.. ZWave at 100kb vs Zigbee at 250kb or WiFi at 56mb? What is that?? 500x smaller use of the bandwidth?
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Of more importance in my calculations is the total number of IP's I have available on an artificially limited /24 subnet. I'm more than capable of increasing my subnet and thus increasing the available IPs to any number I wish. Will the bulbs operate with a non /24 mask? We know that Hubitat won't without intervention.
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The final element in my calculation is the limit on the number of devices my WiFi gear can handle. I "grew up" in the years before WiFi and thus my first response is to use a wire. Thus my WiFi isn't already crowded. Not empty either
A wire might be my first thought but wireless is certainly my second.
I already have a hub dedicated to outward facing traffic and the Lifx bulbs might find themselves added there eventually, but for now, they coexist on one of my ZWave hubs harmlessly.. but I must note that I have polling disabled on them, which helps, I'm sure.
Update:
I looked at device Logs for the hub with Lifx bulbs and they are not even in the top 10 for any of the metrics:
