At least two layers for this issue:
- First is the fact that in core lovelace cards the secondary information available is not reliable from a human readability POV; i.e. one thing I thought I could have here was information of how long the device is in its current state (using
Last Changed, but that’s impossible given that it considers unknown states as well. If the device disconnects for a couple of seconds for some reason or if we reboot HA core, this value changes and it loses that human readability I mentioned. An example of this is the entities card below (which btw could also benefit from a secondary template field!); the switch in question isn’t modified in months, but HA shows it changed 21 hours ago!
- The second layer is more general: current entity status is related to “unknown” status’ is something that ideally would be separate from its physical status. I don’t think I have good suggestions on this, but pairing last known “real” state with a “is it still reachable by HA” state could be one way of doing it.
Templating allows us to do a lot with this, but again, from a human readability POV, I think it’s kind of messy as is.