For advice specific to Home Assistant, I would ask their community. It’s fairly active.
Home Automation
Discussion about general home automation ideas and projects, home automation protocols like Z-wave, Zigbee, Matter, etc, and home automation software and hubs like HomeSeer, Home Assistant, OpenHAB, Homey.
Just recently got the SONOFF-ZB Plus E dongle and it's been working well for me. I was able to flash it to use both ZigBee and Thread.
I am running Aotect Zi-Stick (ZGA008), but I would probably go with Sonoff ZBDongle-E, which is based the same EFR32MG21 chip, but has external antenna.
I recommend to use #Zigbee2MQTT because it's decoupled from home automation software:
- ability to switch software in future without repairing all devices in different software,
- no duplication of efforts to add device support in multiple softwares,
- ability to run (or evaluate) different software in parallel against the same Zigbee network.