Shelly’s are great. I have 24 of them installed(plugs,1pm,1pm mini) and they are the most reliable thing in terms of devices in my setup

apparently it’s possible without a relay look here

i had frigate running locally and could integrate them. That said i grabbed the stream from the local network. I guess you would need some sort of local pi to forward the streams. But that is well above my pay grade ^^ sorry

Reolink. Cheap, good enough quality, great HA integration, no internet connection needed.

Do NodeRED timers survive a restart?

hi logically i thing you are on the right track. A timer is defiantly the right way to go. You can try my blueprint for your automation. Hope it helps