ISO... Dry Contact Momentary Switch Inputs w/ Short and Long press (Zigbee or Zwave)

Yes, the esphome node can directly control all your HA entities (need to allow it ones per node).

# In some trigger
on_...:

  - homeassistant.action:
      action: notify.html5
      data:
        message: Button was pressed

Something like that would go in your esphome yaml to directly trigger ha entites…

For sure, the thread I linked contains something in that direction :point_down: