How to drive a group with a switch?

I am remodelling my son’s room and need your advice on how to manage a group of lamps with a wall switch.

What I had before:

  • three standard lamps with a Sonoff Basic to drive them (so the maps were always ‘mechanically on’, and the power was provided by entities such as switch.michael_standing that was linked to that Sonoff relay)
  • an RF433 switch that was sending one single signal “I was pressed”, though a Sonoff RF bridge - there was a HA event fired then
  • an automation that said “if the RF433 switch is pressed, then toggle the group of lamps”

What I have now:

  • the same lamps with their Sonoff relay
  • instead of the RF433, a Zigbee wall switch (powered) that has two states: on and off. It does not switch anything, just sends its state to HA

What I would like to achieve: to bind the state of the wall switch with the state of the group of lamps. It means that I could switch all lights on and off with the wall switch, and individual lamps through the UI - and that would also change the state of the wall switch.

Is that possible natively in HA?

The workaround I think I will use in the meantime is to have an automation doing the bind (aligning the state of the group with the state of the lamp)

To my knowledge, there’s nothing in Home Assistant to “bind” the state of an entity in one domain (switch) to the state of an entity in another domain (group) other than by using an automation.

For example, if I have two switches and want both to always have the same state, regardless of which switch’s state I change, I will need an automation to do that (and there are blueprints available that will create an automation to do it). Other than an automation, there’s nothing else that can link their states bidirectionally.

As for Groups and Light Groups, they allow you to conveniently set the state of all group members. However, if you change one group member’s state, its fellow members won’t automatically change to the same state.