I am surprised to see how overwhelmingly popular Tuya devices are for Home Assistant users. It appears that devices using the official integration are very combersome to setup, they are cloud dependent, and they will often need to be re-setup due to a re-acceptance of the ToS.
Are people actively buying these devices? Are a lot of homes setup with legacy Tuya devices?
I personally have no Tuya devices in my home and after reading the integration page, I would actively avoid them. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tuya
The integration page shows that Tuya is used by 29.2% of active installations and the number of devices from the graph show a huge gap between Tuya and all other devices. This leads me to think that these devices would be prioritized by the developers. Am I missing something? Are these devices so cheap that they are just worth it for many to deal with the consequences of the cloud and apparent hassle of setup?


Tuya devices are super cheap, often sold as massive loss leaders and frequently rebadged as other brands (MOES comes to mind, as well as lots of “iThing” type brands)
It is not surprising at all that lots of folks eschew the mobile app and use HA to control them. Also the Local Tuya integration is difficult to use and often doesn’t work at all.