Hi @stephandupont, I have around 50 MiBoxer (formerly MiLights) bulbs and am very happy with them. Having found a German shop which sells an E27 for around €11 makes them very affordable and they have all been running nicely for 8 years now.
I use 2 ESP8266s with NRF24L01+ attached and esp8266_milight_hub to control them over MQTT.
Correct, they have their own 2.4 Ghz RF protocol, so for these the ESP32 gateways are required. MiBoxer also makes some bulbs with Zigbee though, if you look around on their site, but I haven’t got any experience with these.