My fan worked fine, so I gave it WiFi

I just turn them off and back on one time using the switch, and the light bulb's state goes to some variation of "on" within no more than a second or two (maybe not an ideal variation of "on", but good enough to get through a dark hallway). Turn back off with the switch, and it's obviously off. On the next "on" cycle of the switch, it goes back to "on".

And while it is freshly "on", it's trying to reconnect to whatever its programmed mothership is (whether local or afar). This works every time, so far in my experience, as long as that mothership is reachable.

The only time blinkey-mode has been imparted is when I've reset things, which takes rapid iterations of off-on cycling of the light switch. (I test this all the time with the Zigbee bulb in my pantry because the light switch in there sure is convenient. It works fine, even if it has been completely off for hours or days. I just tested it again after pulling the USB zigbee dongle from HA, and the pantry light still worked fine with the switch on the wall.)

I've moved these bulbs and other widgets between houses. No issues (other than renaming things after a move). It's really been OK.

Additional background: For Zigbee in particular, I'm doing that in what is probably the least-preferred, least-effort method: I've got a cheap Chinese CC2531 dev kit that is flashed with different firmware (because that was the cheapest approach ~5 years ago), and I'm using it with ZHA in HA (because that's the easiest approach). All of my Zigbee devices have been buttons or light bulbs, all of those bulbs have been from Sengled, and none of any of them support Zigbee router mode at all. There is no Zigbee "mesh" here to speak of at all, so there's no weird interconnections to break: Endpoints talk directly with the CC2531 and that's that.

Other than some range issues (which were broadly resolved by using an old-school non-3.0 USB extension that I found on Amazon in iMac-esque coloration for a dollar), Zigbee has really been OK for me.

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But I've been migrating to wifi, anyway. My favorite light bulbs, from Athom, actually come to me with open-source ESPHome already installed...but Matter-wifi light bulbs are often a bit less expensive than those are. (Tradeoffs.)

This migration started on the basis that my old Zigbee bulbs are -- well -- old. They simply don't produce the same quality CRI that even very cheap dumb department store LEDs do these days.

Besides, I've also already built a quite lovely wifi network for my home, wherein I do not care at all about the performance of the 2.4GHz radios at all so they may as well focus their energy on a sea of IoT devices.

I like the idea of having only one set of wireless networking gear to futz with and optimize instead of having multiples of them. (But I'll probably goof around with Matter-Thread, too, if/when that makes sense to me. I'm by no means done tinkering or learning new things.)

I'm using a Zigbee button from Samjin/Samsung/whoever-that-was which reads temperature, my Nest thermostat (via a convoluted-but-supported path to a remote API), and a couple of Amazon Echo Dot speakers (the integration of which is cursed, but it's easy to set up and usually works).

I was going to try to score some cheap BLE temperature sensors and use the Shelly relay as a gateway to bring those into HA (yeah, it does that too), but then the big mystery ball of tariffs happened and I lost track of that idea.

You did remind me of a thing, though: My Athom bulbs, with ESPHome, do have an annoying mode they drop into when their Home Assistant mothership is unavailable. They still work mostly like dumb light bulbs in this state, but they do a periodic blinky-thing (with a cadence in minutes, not seconds) that is annoying until the HA rig comes back.

But since they're running a copy of ESPHome that I compiled locally, that's almost certainly an ESPHome function that I can hack out/turn off/modify/whatever.

I don't have any direct experience with Tasmota. I remember looking into it with some giddiness several years ago (just because hacking on home electronics does that to me), but by the time it came to start actually buying hardware I decided to go in a different direction.

But I don't recall the Athom bulbs, with ESPHome, ever dropping out and not coming back. Even after the last move where some of them were in a box for weeks: If there was any difficulty, it wasn't something that took a lot of steps to resolve. I think I'd remember if it were challenging in some way.

So I'm lead to wonder what mechanism it is that makes your stuff go goofy with Tasmota.

Inside of these things is just a small power supply, an ESP, some MOSFETs and some LEDs. On-device configuration data is stored in flash right alongside the firmware itself. There's no battery, nor any no real-time clock (if the time is useful, it is set over the network).

Athom does publish steps for switching [some of] their hardware back and forth between Tasmota and ESPHome, if that's ever useful to you: https://github.com/athom-tech/athom-configs

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More broadly, having smart switches and/or dimmers with dumb bulbs does sound appealing. I've got all of the lights in my garage on one smart switch, for instance, and it works well for that environment.

Smart switches would also Grandpa-proof the installation: If a dumb bulb goes out and Grandpa is watching the place, he can just swap it out and things would work fine. (Knowing my own old man, he'd probably use a dusty incandescent bulb that he's had in the glovebox of the car since he stopped to pick it up along the side of an unpaved road somewhere outside of Lincoln Nebraska in 1973...but it'll still work fine.)

But smart switches and relays alike want neutral wires. It's not always straight-forward to integrate them, as I've written extensively about elsewhere here.

And right now, I've got the usual lights in the common areas downstairs set (via the Adaptive Lighting integration) to smoothly adjust their color temperature based on the position of the sun. And I really like that function: I get intense 6000k light during the day that more-or-less emulates the ambient sunlight that comes in through the windows, and a much more serene 3000k light when it's ~dark outside. And nobody has to think about it at all on a day-to-day basis; it Just Works.

This is, quite frankly, pretty glorious to me in ways that I don't think I ever want to give up...so I'm stuck with smart bulbs in lots of places.