Ah, I missed where you said it was Home Assistant. My mind was mostly thinking about all the Nests and other cloud thermostats people tend to buy these days what with the original article talking about killing the device. Still, you need to do maintenance on your Home Assistant server while my 7 day thermostat requires no upkeep other than changing a AA battery every few years.

It being beholden to a cloud server is only half of my point which is the vast majority of the key functionality you talked about could have been achieved with a far simpler and cheaper device that has absolutely no network connectivity at all. Sure, you wouldn't be able to datamine exactly when your thermostat kicked on or off, but to me pressing a button to tell it you're coming home is less automation than your home just automatically being at the temp you want when you're there. If your schedule fluctuates by several hours every day for when you wake, when you leave, when you come home, and when you sleep I guess it could be useful to reprogram that on the fly remotely but for the vast majority of people a 7 day 4 stage programmable is fine. Not everything in my house needs to have an IP address.