Yeah, that was an annoying move, but a bit more understandable in terms of the support overhead of dealing with controller installations in a wide variety of disparate environments. They could have continued to offer it in an "unsupported" state, but then there are already great community-driven FOSS projects like Frigate in that space that are a better fit for the self-hosting segment.
But Ubiquiti doesn't really seem to be going for ecosystem lock-in: on the flipside, earlier this year, they released an update to UniFi Protect that enabled any RTSP-based video stream to be connected into it, rather than just their own cameras. That enabled us to migrate a site with 30+ Hikvision cameras over to UniFi infrastructure without having to purchase all new cameras from Ubiquiti.
Other companies might be disappointed that we didn't buy cameras from them, but maybe the people at Ubiquiti understand that we weren't going to do that in the first place, and not being able to use our existing cameras was a blocking factor for us to move the rest of the infrastructure over to UniFi.
