Philips Hue via Athom or Philips Hue ZigBee?

I agree with that opinion.

You could try. The issue is that Homey cannot handle sending a lot of (Zigbee) commands in parallel, and I don’t know if (de-)activating all lights works like that. In contrast, when using proper Zigbee groups, a controller only has to send a single command and all devices in the group will receive it.