See the last sentence in the following post.
“Hub Replace works for going from v2 to v2, v2 to v3, v3 to v3, v2 to Aeotec etc. You don’t have to be on v3 to use Hub Replace if you have a v2 and it works if both hubs are active and when the old hub has died.”
The drivers do reside on your hub and will get migrated as part of the hub replace. The channels are subscriptions that allow drivers to be installed and then updated when driver updates are published by the developer.
Stock drivers are installed without any intervention on your part. However, ST may not have implemented vendor specific capabilities and so custom drivers from vendors or community developers are needed to access those capabilities. Would it have been nice to have an automated way for vendors/developers to publish drivers and have them auto-retrieved and installed? Yes, it would, but that’s not the way ST chose to implement 3rd party drivers.
Hub Replace works for going from v2 to v2, v2 to v3, v3 to v3, v2 to Aeotec etc. You don’t have to be on v3 to use Hub Replace…