Unfortunately not. I mostly get my stuff from Aliexpress; I’ve found some good Zigbee plugs there.

New Zealand is awesome, but not if you want to have many online shopping options :)

Not necessarily, I have devices that are cloud dependent. Locally in NZ there aren’t a lot of options, all smart plugs are cloud dependent. Also things like weather integrations will stop working.

Home Assistant. It’s a rabbit hole, but it’s great. I’ve got motion enabled lights, thermostats for “dumb” heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.