Have you looked up what “planned obsolescence” is?

It makes a lot of difference. For me shipping times for both would be similar, but I’d have to pay for shipping from the US&A, and possibly some duties/taxes. With AE all of this is already included in the price of what I’m buying (except for some products that aren’t offered with free shipping, which is always clearly stated).

I’m using a WH2650A weather station, and I believe it does not need an internet connection to work at all, and I have been able to connect it to HA locally.

That’s not something I’d assume. Aliexpress sometimes delivers packages within one week for me (I live in Poland).

Sure, that’s definitively safer. With AliExpress even when I had issues they were dealt with properly, but it’s probably better with ifixit

It was a few years ago and even if the seller still exists on the platform (which is not given), I couldn’t find it.

Not risky at all. I’ve bought a replacement on AliExpress a few years ago and it’s fine

Yeah, that would definitely help

How does running your music service through a VPN improve privacy?

Why do you need to be behind VPN?

Turn on the lights in the bedroom based on presence sensor, but only if the bed occupancy sensor detects no one is in bed.

From Zigbee devices I’d highly recommend the ones from Ikea (Somrig, Styrbar, Symfonisk - depending on what you’re going to use it for), and there are a lot more on AliExpress.

Another route might be using ESPHome and program something like Cheap Yellow Display (5-10$ on AliExpress) with LVGL.