At the risk of replying to my own post…
A partial solution was added in Feb 2022 release that is intended to address the issue of orphan. bulbs. Unfortunately for me it didn’t work, perhaps/hopefully it will work for some of you. Link to post: Cannot Remove Old LIFX Bulbs from Home Assistant - #6 by taw123
Update… Good news. I restarted my HA instance and the cached entity names seem to have been purged so I was finally able to delete the old/bogus named entities. This in turn created orphan devices which the new code I referenced above automatically removed (as designed)… Should have thought to try restarting before taking the time to post… Hopefully this now means no one else has to hand edit their database (unless you are into that kinda thing)… lol