Thanks for posting this! This looks like a fine product, and it led me to learn that Starling Home Hub is effectively "homebridge-nest[1] in a box", which is great news for Homebridge[2] users.
I ran Homebridge for a while but got tired of dealing with maintenance. The Starling box is set-it-and-forget-it. I don’t think I’ve had to access the control panel since installing it so it was well worth the $100 imo.
For sure, the reduced cognitive overhead is absolutely worth the price of admission.
I need to run Homebridge anyway for a bunch of devices that I want to be available via Alexa and HomeKit, so for me there was no incremental complexity. I'm running Homebridge via a Docker image[1] on my NAS (using QNAP Container Station), with Homebridge UI to manage.