One of the big benefits of Hue, as alluded to in this article, is that you didn’t
need to use their cloud services or share any data. But that seems to be what is changing. Before, you could just run everything locally on your home network, or really on an isolated subnet since most of the communication happens over Zigbee. It is nice to have automation capabilities for some scenarios to avoid rewiring or to customize lighting for different purposes in the same space with one controller.
But if you don’t personally need it, you also don’t really need to drop in and bash the concept. It is useful for lots of folks and it’s just a fun game for lots of other folks. And most people can just ignore it.