I tried that with one once back in the pre-bot days. While someone could certainly have made it work, I couldn't make sense of the IR commands with available tools and this model wasn't something that others had already figured out (I tried all that ESPHome included).
I thought about building my own controls for it: After all, it's just a compressor and a fan that are each controlled by relays -- how hard could it be to have them controlled by my relays? Or to have its relays controlled by my logic?
But then I discovered that this particular aircon would resume, with a delay[1], after a power outage.
So I turned it on and left it on, and put it on a smart plug. It turned out that this was Good Enough, and there was no drama. It just worked.
Plus, because Home Assistant: I was able to use a temperature sensor that I found available in the Alexa speaker that I already had on the night stand to prove that the overall concept worked. (I added a Zigbee temperature sensor later on.)
[1]: The compressor likes to stay switched off for awhile after it has been recently run. People sometimes like to make it sound complicated or mysterious, but: It's just to help prevent the compressor from trying to restart while from a resting position that is in the middle of a compression stroke. Doing that is harder on things than it could be in the best case, and it stalls the compressor in the worst case (which can then extend to exercising thermal and/or overcurrent protection).
But as long as there's a bit of a gap between runs, then that provides time for the high-pressure side to leak down so there's not so much to compress, and the compressor can restart without too much fuss. That's all; that's the whole merit. My aircon's irrevocable power-up delay handled that problem well-enough, but the logic could be scripted in HA's YAML with a helper if that were necessary.