I think you may have Europe confused with Japan.

Our cat ushers us into bed when it’s near bedtime. If one of us is playing games late or otherwise up past midnight she will literally meow non-stop and chase us into the bedroom, it’s mildly annoying sometimes but very sweet haha. Then she’ll spend a few minutes with us in bed making biscuits before buggering off elsewhere, job completed.

Por qué no los dos?

That is exactly what I did with my dumb washing machine (and dishwasher).

Each has a ZigBee energy monitoring smart plug which is connected to a local Home Assistant instance. Spent an hour or two writing automations based on the power draw reported by the plugs and now I get push notifications that report whenever either machine finishes its cycle (including how long it took).