I have been using HA for about 4 years. I came from an Insteon / ISY environment and wanted to migrate from an end-of-life environment to something more flexible. I started out “playing” with Home Assistant to learn the different Advanced Installation Methods and ultimately settled on the DIY with Raspberry install (Raspberry Pi4 B with Home Assistant running on an SD card).
All my automations are done with Node-Red. This is a personal preference and there are other ways to do automations in Home Assistant (see Getting Started).
I consider my self technically competent and very capable of doing very complex automations but I try to keep things simple. I am very good about having good, reliable backups, reading the release notes, and as @NathanCu does, waiting for releases to settle - don’t update without being informed and being able to recover if something does go wrong. I have not had ANY downtime due to maintenance updates - I know others have but I believe they did not prepare properly.
All that said, I really love working with Home Assistant, this community, and learning a lot of new things. For me, this is a very enjoyable and worthwhile time sink.