alt Hacker NewsHa was very user unfriendly when I last tried it ~3 years ago.
Yaml was necessary and it required a lot of fiddling to make z-wave work. Each blind was detected as ~5 things (2 useless or no idea what for)... Checking what was position, what power, ect was rather annoying.
I made work and something broke about a year later. I just replaced it with off the shelf stuff.
HASS configuration has gotten a lot better in the past few years. Almost everything can now be done via the UI, including automation and scripting, and it's one of the smoothest scripting GUIs I've used. It even supports cut/paste for visual blocks. And for those 5% cases, there's an inline YAML editor which will open (and validate) only the pertinent block of what I'm sure is a 1000-line YAML file for editing in-browser.
Z-Wave is still dodgy, but the migration to zwavejs has been an improvement and probably is as good as things will get with the state of Z-Wave being what it is.
It's still not perfect, but HASS has become one of my user-facing open-source success stories. Most of the remaining annoyances are out of their control at this point.