I may be a bit late to the story, but home assistant now has the ability to update Z-Wave device firmwares. This is good for keeping IOT devices more secure and eliminate bugs in the devices. The updates show up in the same list in the settings menu as add-on upgrades and home assistant core updates.
Though there isn’t much in the update details for my GE switches, the update did improve the responsiveness of the physical switch, now button press to light change is much faster (minimal lag) than before the update (maybe 500ms lag).