I agree on active devices, and most of the ecosystem is similarly frustrating to deal with.

And why rely on someone else's software for this in 2026? I vibecoded a Rust+Starlark zigbee hub software that uses a few MB of RAM on my router and can directly dispatch HTTP for alerting, as well as exposing prometheus metrics. Zigbee2MQTT apparently wants several hundred MB of RAM.

For passive monitoring, I have six water leak sensors and two temperature/humidity sensors.

The crucial thing is that I can fix it if it breaks. I can debug the low level network packets, support whatever hardware I want, and not have to rely on someone else's cloud ecosystem.

It's great!