Makes sense. Good work.

I remember using Monica years back for something similar. Quickly lost the habits of using it since it was a lot of work updating and it didn’t feel like it was worth the effort.

I mean - the ones you can buy from Amazon are the same you buy from Aliexpress, just more expensive. Of course, one could fear that some of them have failed QA or whatever - but I would not have much reason to suspect malicious firmware - and if you do, you can flash your own. You do that anyway if you want to use the dongle as a Zigbee router (instead of coordinator).

What is a sketchy option?

I just bought a Sonoff Zigbee Dongle Plus E and use ZHA and it works like a charm. No third party cloud based coordinator. I guess you still have to trust the firmware of the dongle, but that is about it.