I still like my physical switch on the wall to turn the light on and off very much.. for me it's hard to beat. I can even turn it on/off semi-remotely with e.g. a tennis ball.

If my Alexa fails, then I can also just turn the light off with the switch and when flipped back "on" again, then it will be on.

Fallback to 'classical mode' works for me.

If your home automation system requires a network connection to work then something is very wrong.

Right? Home automation is perfectly fine and mught even expose a secure authenticated API to the internet so you can say check and adjust the temperature remotely, but it shoukd never ever go down for lical use if the Internet connectivity or the remote service backend goes down.

Home Assistant rulez with non-cloud sensors. I never by sensors, cameras, switches which require connection to an external host. But I'm sure that most people will do it even with such outages too.