ouch! Local only has been a long term campaign for me. The last thing was my thermostat which I found out was cloud connected when my network went down. I've since fixed it using the ecobee local homekit integration. Great test is to manually pull the wan port and see what breaks!

Yeah I'm right there with you. I have one of their beta devices and it.... Kinda works?? The one thing Alexa does very very well is picking up on the voice who spoke her name over a very loud environment. I can have my TV blasting and it'll still hear me without needing to shout louder than the TV. Using Alexa via Haaska rather than giving Alexa direct control was a requirement for me though because I don't want it to know full details of what it's actually controlling, just device names and types.