I'm writing another post about my home lab. Currently it sounds complex and over-engineered, but I think that's because of how I'm describing it. I'm working through some of the details so that it - on paper - it sounds as simple as it is. I'll post back to HN when it's finished. Stay tuned.
Looking forward to it! Have you looked at node-red at all? It would slide right into your setup and might give you some new capability beyond what home assistant provides. I use it to run a distillation process that would look pretty similar to your smoker setup. You could add humidity controls, fresh air induction/mixing, load cells to monitor weight and strap those together in PID loops to drive to your targets.
Fresh air induction plus temperature monitoring on a PID loop is exactly what the heatermeter open source project does, which he mentions pivoting to at the end of the article.
