If you have the Hue Bridge, use the Hue Bridge.
Yes, you can directly connect the Hue Bulbs direct to ST, but if ST goes down, and the app is inaccessible (like last night) you have 0 control of your bulbs.
If you have Smart Lighting rules setup with your Hue bulbs and it’s running locally, yes those Automations will potentially still run based on time or other events of other local devices, but you will have no manual control of these bulbs.
If you have the Hue Bridge, then you have your own little mini ecosystem that will still function on it’s own and full control of lighting via the Hue App or through Alexa and voice control.
There are so many people that have had issues removing bulbs added directly that you have to have the Bridge or another compatible remote to do so.
It’s not worth the pain in my opinion. The Bridge serves a purpose and a great one at that.
While planning for what you expect to work in SmartThings, you also need to pre plan your backup or back out plan so that you can still function in some capacity should an outage occur in any of your environments (ST, Hue, Alexa, Wemo, LIFX). A lot of people don’t plan this out ahead of time, until an actual outage occurs and then get upset or frustrated that nothing works because everything is dependent on one platform: