No hub is required for the Tplink lights - they are independent wifi devices - and I think they announced HomeKit support is coming, so that is good because they are really affordable.
So, yes. Homekit, timed automation always went off without a hitch. If I set the downstairs lights to come on at 6AM, they always came on. You need some kind of a HomeKit hub, like an Apple TV or stay-at-home iPad, but I never had a problem with Siri and telling her to turn on or off things.
My problem was that I bought a house with Nest thermostats, and I stuck with Nest for my doorbell camera - the Hello. So none of that stuff worked with HomeKit. I picked up a few Google Homes and a Google Home Hub (on those crazy Christmas sales) to see if I could just use Google Home for a smart house. I ran into too many headaches and returned almost all of the devices - I kept the Google Home Mini I got from Spotify for a buck, and I picked up a cheap Raspberry Pi for Homebridge for the Nest stuff.
My main problem with the Google Home software is it is more cloud reliant than HomeKit. The Wemo smart plug wasn't working one morning - turns out that it was on Wemo's server's side -nothing I could do about it. Asking Google to turn on the lights mostly worked, but again, every few days I'd get an error message saying Google couldn't communicate. And the big one is Routines - they have a mind of their own and would start and stop at the strangest times. If you google Google Home Routine problems you will find a lot of people complaining about it.
Hands down, the BEST feature of the Google Homes is that multi-room audio playback. My family loved it, and it is a really affordable option - if you have Spotify or Google Music, etc. Google Music is nice, but I ran into other problems with that, since I have an iPhone - CarPlay didn't work so well with Google Music - and that was another problem.
This post is getting a little long - basically I was trying to see if I could leave the Apple ecosystem - and it was a failure. My wife got really annoyed with me for switching things up too. Google's services are great - but they are better if you are more in the Android ecosystem than Apple.