ive got dozens of esp32s just lying around. Ive got 3 Harmony hubs, i need not IR my friend. hubs are only good for one thing, talking to the cloud, we try to stay away from that as much as possible here.
I had a similar issue with Rainpoint Smart Irrigation, and I installed the Tuya integration in Home Assistant to solve it. After that, I was able to do everything I wanted. The functionality was a bit limited, but all the important features were available in HA. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to test it with the SwitchBot Mini yet, but the app seems to be exactly like Tuya.