so apparently the conclusion to my past 40 minutes of trying to figure out what's wrong with my IOT lightbulb is that yandex's smart home backend is down. no incident reports, nothing. i only learned about this after visiting the official telegram group chat where i saw people complaining about this.
really incompetent on their side to not notify users of downtime. my lightbulb doesn't work in the meanwhile.
also theory: it's a dark promo for the Station Midi, which was recently announced with the ability to send smart home commands without internet connection.