Different things Will work for different people, and it’s hard to really evaluate the new architecture since it’s not fully here yet.
As I’ve said in other threads, I myself am feeling mildly optimistic about the future of smartthings. I like the trajectory, I like the stated goals, I like what I’ve seen the community to so far with Edge Drivers. But as always, we will have to wait to see what we actually get.
My own relationship as an ordinary customer with SmartThings has changed significantly since I first bought a V1 hub back in 2014. I don’t use much custom code and I really want to limit the amount of tinkering the system requires since I have to pay someone else to do pretty much everything, even pop the batteries on a sensor to reconnect it to the network. (I’m quadriparetic.) so after two years of trying lots of different things including a V2 hub and finding that I just couldn’t get the reliability I needed for critical use cases, I started using HomeKit as well as SmartThings.
Then in 2018 they broke voice navigation for the ST app, and in spite of multiple promises from multiple staff members, it’s never really been fixed. And they added automatic discovery of LAN-connected devices, which I really didn’t want. (Our house has three flatmates, and one of them has completely separate systems. But his devices kept getting added to our smartthings account because we’re on the same LAN.) so at that point I shifted to a “hub optional“ setup. I still use smartthings, particularly for SwitchBot devices and virtual switches, and I still like a lot of things about it. It’s entirely possible that I will add an ST hub again once the transition to the new platform is complete in order to take advantage of Edge Drivers, including from local virtual devices. But I don’t know yet.
If you have a lot of groovy custom code-based functionality that you don’t see a way to replace in the new architecture, you might want to take a look at hubitat. It runs a local groovy implementation on its hub, including a Webcore version, And while it has its own pluses and minuses, and probably isn’t as suitable for someone looking for plug and play options, it has proven popular with power users who want that local groovy option. So just something to consider.
The most important thing is to know your own needs and priorities and then do the research to find a system that gives you a pretty good match to that. Don’t make any assumptions about the reliability, versatility, inter-operability, or power of any given candidate until you’ve drilled down into the details and talked with some people who are using it. Pretty much every company uses the same marketing buzzwords these days, but the reality of what they deliver for daily use can vary a lot.