Before you ask, I've posted in the HA Community forums but haven't had any responses yet.  Hoping for some helpful advice from the GZ community.

I've been tearing my hair out trying to get something (seemingly) simple working in Home Assistant.  When I moved house a few months ago I nuked my old setup because it was getting a bit messy and chaotic, and I was looking to simplify in the new rental place where I wouldn't be able to use all of my previous gear.  I used to have my smart bulbs (Tuya) running via LocalTuya, but ran into some issues there (but managed to solve it by using the Tuya Local integration instead which I've found to be much easier).  I also used Emulated Hue to provide simple voice control via Alexa devices around the house.  It saved me the cost of a Nabu Casa subscription, and was less hassle than the whole AWS/Lambda method which I was never able to get working.  But I've tried to setup Emulated Hue again, and it doesn't seem to be working.

I've loaded in the appropriate script into the config.yaml file and it checks out.  But when I ask Alexa to discover devices she doesn't find the devices that I've exposed in the config.yaml script.  I do have a small number of Hue devices connected via a physical Hue Bridge (I tried to connect them to my Zigbee coordinator but they were quite slow and unrepsonsive - they improved dramatically when connected directly to the Hue Bridge) and those are detected by Alexa, but none of the devices that I exposed in the Emulated Hue script.

So I tried looking for solutions online - HA Community, Youtube, Reddit - but nothing seemed to match.  Then I stumbled on another method using NodeRed.  I've never used NodeRed before but I found a tutorial which seemed straightforward enough.  The NodeRed Alexa skill linked to in the video didn't seem to be available but another one was, and I signed up to that web UI and it was very similar to the one linked to in the video.  The next step was to install the NodeRed add-on in Home Assistant.  I did that, but SSL is turned on by default.  The video recommended turning off SSL if I didn't have a certificate (which I don't) - but when I disable SSL in the config page of NodeRed, it immediately turns back on when I leave the config page, so when I try to start the add on it fails because I don't have a SSL certificate.

Any ideas here?  It seems like I'm stumbling from one problem to the next, and it shouldn't really be this hard.  Having got it running once before - and not much has changed from my previous setup, at least not that I can tell - it feels frustrating to not be able to solve this.  I know I could just subscribe to Nabu Casa, but the thought of paying just for voice control (my setup is not that sophisticated to make use of all the other things that a NC sub could offer) seems silly.  And yet being able to voice control the lights would make things a lot easier.

Any suggestions?  If I can't solve it then it seems like my only other option is to nuke it and start over from scratch, but that would annoy vast amounts of the household and take up time that I really don't want to spend.