I’m glad you like that idea. If it ends up being doable, I think it will result in a cleaner appearance and allow for a full-height light bar.
While your attention is here (tangent warning), I think I recall mention that with the Blue series, addressable LEDs were being considered for the strip, but I didn’t see mention of it on this topic. It would be awesome if the strip was addressable and I would be willing to pay more for it! I have notifications for the switch near my front door: solid blue if ran is forecasted and blinking yellow if there’s mail in the mailbox. The issue that I’m hopeful an addressable strip would fix is notification overlap. Both of these notifications could be true at the same time, I currently have to use some virtual switch entities in Home Assistant to track which notifications are active and then have an automation run on state change that enforces a priority so the mail notification displays if both are active. With an addressable strip, each notification could have a separate block of LEDs. I think that would make notifications way more flexible and easier to implement in some scenarios.
All of my lights are dimmable. I tend to put slightly higher equivalent wattage LED bulbs in so I can have really bright lights at 100% when cleaning, but then just typically run the fixtures at around 50% for day-to-day use. This works for the most part, but sometimes it’s midday, a bit overcast, you want to add some light to the space, and 50% might not be bright enough to contribute significantly to the overall brightness of the space. This leads to an interaction where you turn on the light, then have to adjust the brightness manually. I’d like to dynamically set the power on brightness based on the lux value. Put another way, I’m not manually interacting with the light switch because I simply want the light fixture on, I’m interacting with the switch because I want to add brightness to the space (but 100% brightness is typically overkill otherwise I’d just use the double-tap scene I configured to set it to 100%). By periodically polling the lux sensor, I could have Home Assistant adjust the power on brightness so that it is high enough to add brightness to the space when powered on, but not overly bright. It would be neat if this could become local configuration parameters (adaptive_bightness=on/off, adaptive_brightness_weight=numerical value that would be multiplied with the current lux value to determine brightness percentage when turning on the switch) but I’m not sure if there would be enough demand to justify development time.
I could of course buy some separate lux sensors to scatter around, but I find the concept of gaining quick lux coverage of my spaces via AC-powered sensors built into all the light switches to be very compelling. No extra devices to set up, power, and mount somewhere.