My take currently. Exactly this. Buy Sonoff things, Raspberry Pi, and do some vibe coding. All local first.
Also use static IP addressing on your home network.
Your router is a point of failure, so an internet outage making it go weird doesn't mean you want all your stuff becoming on manageable).
IoT is honestly one of the best ways to rapidly learn SRE concepts.
Same. But instead of rPi get a cheap N100 etc. 'real' PC with M.2.