For me, it didn't prompt the upgrade when I went to the firmware page, but it did prompt for it when I went into the matter settings page.
I think Switchbot does slow rollouts, but if it's not available for you yet you can just send them a message in the feedback page of the app and they'll probably be able push the upgrade to you (I've done this a couple of times for previous matter releases).
It's not thread-based matter to the vacuum directly, but matter over wifi using their Hub 2 as a bridge, but I just tested and it works! The vacuum shows up as a binary OnOff plug, toggling it on starts a cleaning session, and off cancels the session and returns the unit to base.
I should note, I had to update my Hub 2 firmware to V2.0-1.2, which also adds the ability to swap out the temperature and humidity sensors to other devices for being a matter bridge, which is nice.
From UCTronics. Take a look at their selection they’ve got a big range from basic ones like this, some with little displays included, and some that stack vertically to really maximize efficiency, etc.
I don't have raw numbers, since it's running Home Assistant that doesn't give you a nice way to test disk speed, but the startup is significantly faster. I found it could take a minute or two with the microSD card, but on NVME it seems to be only around 30 seconds until I can access the web UI or SSH in.
To provide a counterpoint, I think it can definitely be worth it to throw together a cheap VR setup for this game.
I personally went through Half-life Alyx on my original Oculus Rift CV1 and it was still an amazing experience. I don't know where you live, but in my market a good condition CV1 is selling for about 10,000 yen (so that's equivalent to 65 USD, but your market will probably vary).
This is PC VR though, so you'll probably want a PC with at least a 1080-class GPU. Once you have the headset though there's a few games from the same era which had simlarly incredible experiences like Lone Echo.