Yes, Homey is a zigbee controller, but not the best, and very limited compared to monitoring and self-checking, and pairing multiple devices on the fly.
There’s also weird compatibility issues between certain brands, which don’t occur with Z2M.
Indeed Z2M needs to run at separate hardware, like an Rpi (Raspberry Pi) with a Sonoff Zigbee dongle, and it communicates with Homey per MQTT (which uses wifi)
But I can imagine it’s all too complicated at this time.
I can recommend to run Z2M as Home Assistant add-on, here’s a “from A to Z” tutorial I wrote
