Home assistant works perfect in HomeKit, plus you have the benefit of advanced automations in home assistant

If you are using hue through HomeKit, you should be able to pause / block the hue hub from the internet and still use it through HomeKit. This is a work around to hue wanting to access your devices.

Alternatively, Home Assistant is amazing if you ask me. I’m an amateur and found it really easy to uses. The only reason I’ve kept the hue hub is because I already have it set up, otherwise if I was starting from scratch I’d use a Zigbee dongle or home assistant yellow for all my Zigbee devices