Nope. A mere WiFi connection is not enough to be HomeKit-compatible. The device that communicates with HomeKit needs to have special hardware (an encryption coprocessor). Philips solved that problem by putting all of that in the Bridge, which communicates to the bulbs via ZigBee (which is better than WiFi for this application anyway for reasons I've explained in a previous post). Even if the old Hue bulbs were directly WiFi enabled, like LIFX (which still doesn't support HomeKit--and likely can't without additional hardware...oh, and LIFX still uses a mesh network rather than WiFi for inter-bulb communication), we'd probably still need to replace all the bulbs--and probably add them individually to HomeKit, each with their own QR code, instead of doing it once for just the Bridge like you can now. I'll take the Bridge.
Please expand on this and provide specific examples because not only do I think it's not true, I think it's actually easier with the Bridge. I only need to add the Bridge to HomeKit (once) and just change some configuration within the app if I add or remove bulbs and want to use them with HomeKit, and the only limitations are things Apple or Philips just doesn't have a good way to support yet (like grouping bulbs--which the Bridge hardware actually supports but the functionality isn't exposed in the Hue app [yet?]). This should become easily possible with software updates in the future.
