When is it finally going to trickle into common sense that needlessly hooking an embedded device up to the Internet is a bad idea? An ethernet jack is an attractive nuisance, not a feature.
It's a video player, some of the common uses of a device like this would be Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, and DIAL.
Money doesn't grow on trees, why would I stop using a device only because it is 5 years old?
The embedded system may function excellently at its task, but most hardware manufacturers are not up to the task to providing long term support.
Telsa kind of does this with their cars. If you drive near a tesla service center your car will automatically connect to the the tesla wifi. You cannot disable this (although you can turn off wifi one-time until the next time the car is turned on, and maybe that works)
That's one of the big complications with ripping Blu-Ray discs. Even once you've broken the copy protection it's a guessing game what's played when. Also why VLC still doesn't have menu support.
I've got a decade+ old Blu-ray player with an ethernet jack. A network switch is a standard part of my entertainment center. Every time I've moved things around, I've resisted the call to add an extra cable and find out what network services are available. With my network setup I can easily block it from having Internet access, and it's still a hard no. There is just no upside, and a huge downside of it being more likely to break, and then having to buy a new player for the rare times I want to play a legacy disc.
My receiver is hooked to the network, but with no Internet access. It has an embedded webserver that can control it. But now that it's out of the warranty period I would never let it update itself, as that's a good way for a manufacturer to break a device with no recourse. Firmware used to be shipped with no updates, and that worked well. Weighing the chance of it being bricked from a manufacturer's update versus an attacker with vulnerability also getting past my router, the latter seems much less likely.
I know I'm bailing out a leaking boat here (cheap embedded cell modems are around the corner, which will necessitate doing surgery). But the market has to catch on some time...