I have a bunch of home assistant enabled hardware. Sometimes, it dies, and needs to be replaced. The experience of changing a piece of hardware (like for like swaps) can be anything from very easy to yeah, delete the entire dashboard and start again. I’ve had to edit the core entities file on a few occasions to replace an identifier that changed (think a MAC address) and similarly manually edit dashboards. Nothing changed except some unique key, but that unique key is everywhere. Tying identifiers to semi-mutable state of a device and then using that identifier extensively makes a hardware replacement cycle extremely challenging, in many cases. We need a better way. In some ways, I preferred the old way, where you’d pick the entity name, and that would be the thing that was everywhere. New device gets the same name, and you’re off to the races.
But having done cellphone replacement cycles, dead hardware replacements, internet gateway replacements, home assistant has an extremely poor experience for such replacement cycles, with answers typically of “delete everything and start again”. Not user friendly, and extremely WTH.