I bought one to set up some home automation.
Have fun, its a rabbit hole, but a fun one :-)
EDIT: Also if you are in the UK. Poundland have some Tuya/SmartLife compatable Wifi sockets for £5 a piece - https://www.poundland.co.uk/446890-ultrabrite-wifi-controlle... You can open them and reflash then with Tasmota but they are a pain to open.
The EASY option is to stick with using Tuya/Smartlife and add Tuya/Smartlife to HA, just remember to remove the Smartlife skill from Alexa otherwise you can end up with dupicates and Alexa getting confused when you want to turn things on/off.
ATM (imo) the "tuya old" intergration is better than the current offical tuya version (They changed things when updating it, which removed some compatibility but they said they would re add it at a later date, but duno if Tuya actually got round to it yet).
Also if you do use Home Assisant, get into the habbit of reading the patch notes before updating, quiet often there will be breaking changes which mess up with your set up.
Not sure if you tried it, but depending on the age of the stock or the tardiness of the OEM in applying security patches, it may be possible to flash them without opening them first.
But I have 10 (8 in use, two on hand incase I ever want another lamp/secuirty light around the home, well atm the spares are in use for the christmas lights, but will go back into standby status after the lights come down.) of these ultrabight poundland sockets and all of them are ESP based. (though the ones I've recently added to my collection couldn't be flashed with tuyaconvert and needed some surgery, the last 2 in my collection I couldn't be arsed and just left them with the Tuya firmware and use the tuya API to control them, but thats my own lazyness not that they cna't be done.)
For ceiling lights I use shellys so I could retain the use of the wall switch to control them.
I just bought raspberry pi 4 on amazon through canakit. It came with a bunch of other stuff that was useful like sd card, case, cable, hdmi mini to hdmi converter, etc, so it really wasn't that bad.
Here's the equivalent for rpi zero for $50
https://smile.amazon.com/CanaKit-Raspberry-Wireless-Complete...