I have a bias against go-control. The quality is not as good as other products. My experience is with garage door controllers and I had two fail. I had an irrigation controller and it never failed on me but others reported problems. I don’t think these are made anymore. I use the homeseer usb z-wave plugin as I have recently migrated from that platform. It works well with HA.
I run my usb dongle on a supermicro 1u server. it just works with z-wave-js. I don’t think you will have problems with the nortek dongle.
The USBZB-1 stick is quite old, especially now 700 Series Z-Wave Plus v2 devices are now widely available. You may be better served with a 700 Series stick unless you also need the Zigbee radio too.
I believe all chips in the 500 Series sticks are made by SiLabs so compatibility with the Z-Wave Plus standard should not be an issue.