I'm trying desperately to convince some family members who have an expensive LG 'smart' TV to buy something dumb - they don't use the smart 'features' and I am sick of getting calls that they need help re-flashing the firmware because it got stuck booting for the hundredth time or android/the TV app froze again. When the stupid thing 'works' it takes several minutes to boot and the TV app regularly just ...closes. When you try to set the time and date, it saves it wrong or just unsets it so you it can't show you the TV guide which is just atrocious! It can't even have feature parity with the first digital signal pre-'smart' TV TVs. It's almost unusable and it's ~3 years old, which is just unacceptable for a TV from an industry leading manufacturer that cost several thousand dollars. I hope this is not a typical experience.
"Just don't connect it to the internet" does not a dumb TV make. It doesn't negate the atrocious software on the stupid things, or the resulting (imo) shortened lifetime. It also doesn't necessarily stop it from finding a network. "Use a pi-hole", "blacklist it in your router", or "remove the TV's network card" sucks as well; consumers shouldn't have to go to such lengths to circumvent such atrocious anti-consumer practices in the first place, even if they do know how to. It took me a few months to track down a totally dumb 4K TV with a big screen. Most manufacturers just don't make them any more. Why would they? It's so much more profitable for them not to, even if there is a demand. I'd love to know how much of a demand for totally dumb TVs there is.
/rant