I need to soften my statement some in light of future research and how I’ve gotten the system working since writing. 1.1.2 FW and/or TP-Link’s cloud service is absolutely the fail here. From an integration standpoint, I would say a note on ‘current bugs’ is appropriate, as the fix appears to be when you have an issue (after installing through the Tapo app) to toggle third party support off and on (or on-off-on if it was never on) to unstick the access.
The research and experience I’ve had shows that with 1.1.2 TP-Link included a new encryption protocol for ‘user safety’, which in a standard system can make sense. They knew this would break comparability with open source projects like HA, so they added the ‘third party’ opt-in toggle for users to use to downgrade the security to allow integrations. But either the power strip isn’t remembering the setting, or the cloud is not preserving the setting properly, requiring that to be reset periodically if adding new devices, forcing a full system reset.
Overall, this is still a bad look for TP-Link, as we have gone from working with open source projects freely to a ‘I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further’ model, and I for one think ‘this deal is getting worse all the time’