Both!

The native automation is perfectly cromulent for what I want, usually, but there's a couple of cases where the integrations either don't exist or don't return meaningful data.

FOR EXAMPLE, the video playback in the living room thing. Sure, the roku integration says "something is playing" but it's shockingly wrong and unreliable. What happens is it falls into 'idle' status between videos, or if you're fast forwarding sometimes and thus the automation was not doing exactly what I wanted.

The Jellyfin API, though, can look at the living room tv user and is spot on as to what is going on with play/pause/stopped statuses, so I have node red yank that data direct from the API and it works great.