https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0
To me, this really shows the sad direction smart appliances have gone in. I would love to see that smart appliances would have continued to evolve in this direction. I don't like the current state of smart appliances, but going back to the absolute basic seems like an over-reaction to me.
The only smart devices left are some smart bulbs, and I'm waiting for them to fail before replacing them with regular LEDs. Nothing beats the reliability and energy/resource savings of plain locks and buttons.
If you look beyond the consumer-grade trash, you can get somewhere nice with $500 if you go the DIY route with modules/relays supporting open protocols and Home Assistant, or if you have several thousands to spare check out higher-end solutions such as Crestron.
Any good system will be completely self-contained, not rely on the internet, and provided the hardware is maintained should last essentially forever.
Unless you have free spare electricity, I think it’s very difficult for smart electric lighting to be environmentally friendly. The controllers simply need too much standby power.
For example, https://eprel.ec.europa.eu/screen/product/lightsources/84743... is a 5W IKEA lamp that uses 0,3W when powered off. So, the lamp itself uses 4,7W, and you can leave that light on for about 1½ hour every day for the power that the controller uses. Said otherwise, you currently have to have such a light on longer than needed for 1½ hour every day to make up for the energy use of the controller. Add in energy used to make the controller and it gets worse.
There are days where I accidentally leave on a light for 1½ hours, but that’s nowhere near the average over all my lamps over a year.
Smart lights give you convenience. They won’t help saving the environment.