Personally my TV is offline with an AppleTV for streaming.
The sales pitch can’t be “sure that TV is the same as ours for double the price, but wait until nexts years model!”
Well, better reason to buy the cheap one today.
(Yes, that restriction includes changing the HDMI source for your Apple TV. Simply not possible without.)
One problem is the TV nags you to enter set it up every time you turn it on. We have to keep the TV remote around just to use the power on/off button.
Not the end of the world, but I'd rather have the product that fits my application.
I strongly suspect most game consoles are spying on you just as much as a smart TV would and all of them currently seem to be pushing ads in your face pretty aggressively too. Still probably better than roku which records and sends home multiple screenshots of whatever you're watching every second, but if my PS5 isn't doing some form of ACR already I suspect it's only a matter of time.
I did some minor ps3 hacking a decade or so back, and dumped the network activity. Every boot it would send some XMPP traffic containing a log of your recent activities back to Sony. What you watched over Dlna, what dvds/Bly-rays you played, which games, for how long and when.
I imagine things have only got more detailed since then in newer consoles.