Are wifi bulbs actually disqualified here, or just unfashionable?

Every thread tells me to go Zigbee or Z-Wave and treat wifi bulbs as a beginner mistake. My hesitation is that adding a hub is the thing I was trying to avoid, and I’ve read that some wifi bulbs expose a local API so nothing has to leave the network. If that’s true the cloud objection seems handled. Is anyone actually running wifi bulbs locally and finding it fine, or is there a catch I’m missing?