If you want smart functionality, it had better run entirely locally, or else you should not care about or depend on that functionality.
-edit- I also had to learn this lesson (somewhat) painfully. I chose the EVSE that I did for 2 reasons: it was on the list of devices my power company would help pay for and it had an HA integration. less than 6 months after I bought it, the company killed the API that the HA integration relied on.
Luckily for me, the HA integration wasn't that big of a deal, more of "nice to have", but I learned my lesson to never use non-local cloud functionality as a selling point.
The bridge already has some weird requirements like refusing to work unless you connect an ethernet cable. As far as I know the update is to force you to use an account with the app, but the devices should still be compliant with other controllers.