Author here: Yeah, I cut that out at the last minute, but my feeling is that if you need to use the dashboard, the automation has failed. I put the app on my wife's phone, but she almost never uses it. She does use a touch screen on the wall, though, to bump up the heat, but that's about it.

That depends on what you want to do, though.

I like the energy dashboard a lot, it has literally all data in a single view including cost and PV. There's nothing to automate: the dashboard is the point.

I also don't automate my lights. I don't want to automate my lights because our life isn't run on such a tight schedule. It always ends up less useful than a light switch in the wall.

What I do want is to turn off all lights in one go when we go out, and quickly glance at the status of lights all over the house.

For these kinda things a dashboard is perfect.

Exactly. If you have a “dashboard” that you have to use more than a couple times a week, you’re doing it wrong. Well, in my opinion, at least.

I don't know, many installations like the one OP describes have many more functions that light switches etc., like turning on scenes and automations. You could of course have buttons lying around everywhere, or a panel on the wall, but I'm not sure that's much better than using the phone dashboard app.