if it was that easy then it wouldn’t have taken me so long to fix my issue.
Actually if you read the post where I ask the question the first time I tell you that it was an error in HACS that the logs showed was the problem.
I believe that the logs might have been wrong in that case, tho, because when I finally did remove HACS from the .storage directory files my system still wouldn’t start. I don’t remember the details of every step I took to recover but eventually ended up destroying the old container and rebuilding (I use HA core in docker) and that didn’t fix it, then I renamed my old configuration.yaml so the system would create a new one and started adding back a few pieces at a time until it failed again. I’m not sure why but I had to do that a couple of times until the last component that it failed on was the standard Foscam camera integration. I removed it from yaml, restarted and then added it back in and everything has been fine since. I have no idea what the problem ultimately was. There was just a glitch somewhere that caused a corruption in something.
I had made no changes to HACS or the configuration.yaml, particularly not the camera integration, before the failure. I had restarted HA after a simple automation change (I think) and the system never came back.
If every integration was configured in the UI then 90% of the steps I took to recover would have been impossible.
And remember, I’m no rookie when it comes to HA. It’s not like I was just flailing around in the dark trying to fix things. I had a plan based on sound troubleshooting technique. And I still struggled for a few hours even with the vast majority of my config in yaml. If everything was done in the UI then I think I would have been done. If I ended up needing to re-install from scratch then it would have been a daunting task to have to re-add every single integration I use thru the ui again.
HA is designed to use custom components. Not only is it desired it’s actively encouraged. I would say that over 90% of the frontend components that people actually use in their systems are custom plugins.
And I’m also sure that a large part of users integrations are also custom integrations. I personally am using almost 30 custom components right now.
The official devs say that custom components aren’t supported but everyone knows that without them HA wouldn’t be where it is right now. And as such there ought to be an official way to fix things that break in your config even if those are custom components. And just because a component is built-in doesn’t mean it can’t get corrupted in some way as it did in my setup.