[lawn]

The basics of Zigbee isn't Home Assistant, it's something like zigbee2mqtt with a USB dongle and then you interface directly to an mqtt broker.

For my automations I do just that and I bypass home assistant and control my devices directly over mqtt. It works very well.

[baq]

Home assistant absolutely can own the Zigbee coordinator, it works very well, too (this is what I’ve been using for a couple years with the SkyConnect dongle.)

[lawn]

Yes, my point was just that you don't have to rely on Home Assistant if you don't want to.