Find a better brand of equipment? Google owns Nest, so its no surprise that they'll want to force you into more of their "services".
Generally, with sensors and other simple IoT type appliances.... I like to pick up the sensors themselves, wire them up to an ESP32, and have that report the sensor states to my MQTT server.
The ESP32-C3 units are very nice lightweight and compact units, very well supported by Zephyr RTOS.
Note: If you want it to work in Zephyr, avoid -C6. They're only recently supported and don't have RF yet (I understand that they're aiming for some time next year with RF), which is kind of the whole point of them.