As an European I hope we can capitalize on this, Russia is cut off from western suppliers and the US is cut off from... Probably everyone? Time to manufacture! Better not let the Chinese have the whole pie.
People are interesting, "average" is a misleading concept, you can find quirks and intriguing oddities in pretty much anyone. Perhaps you're frequenting the wrong circles in regards to what interests you.
I have a non-touch 1080p one I got for work, 80€, brand is Arzopa. Works fine, uses USBC for power and video which is quite cool since it's a single cable, it has 2 usbc ports, I guess if you have a lower power output on your PC's port you can add a power brick, they're also both functional so if one breaks you still have the other one. It also has a mini HDMI port.
It came with three cables: usbc-usbc, usbc-usbc, miniHDMI-HDMI, all three good quality.
It has folder case but carrying it in my backpack damaged it anyway, I have a couple bright spots, but they're rarely visibile.
If you take charge of maintaining this system, maybe it would be easier to install HA supervised in a docker container and have another container for wireguard+syncthing.
A pi5 with 8gb should be enough unless your parents' HA is an hypertrophic installation with hundreds of devices.
I had an embedded Celeron server, passively cooled with 1 hard drive and 2 SSD which used to idle in the range you mentioned, measured at the outlet... It had a random PSU that came with the mini case it was in.
Realistically, how low do you aim to go? Disks for example add a lot of wattage.
It's possible but honestly it's a bit off-putting to me.
For scheduled actions I use the Scheduler addon:
It's mostly for covers and awnings, I don't schedule lights on and off, I enable their motion sensors depending on the time of day, but that's a more complex automation and I wrote it in Node-RED, which to me is a cleaner approach than the automation system in HA.
The Scheduler has the advantage of being wife-accessible too!
Holy shit can you guys read the article please? It's an existing standard and a dedicated keycode