The story is both a little overblown and a little underblown, just different parts of it. More people need to be thinking about the feature level of devices and understand that "off" doesn't really mean it most of the time. Does the TV need a camera? Does it really need a microphone? Does it need to be smart at all? The matter of whether it is abused is increasingly less important than whether it can be abused. There have been all kinds of clever abuses we've been lucky not to see over the past 3 decades, but I'm afraid that relative quiet may be over.
I still don't understand why there wasn't an absolute outrage about internet providers putting their own routers inside your network and blocking other routers by default unless you call them. Suddenly all these providers have managed hardware inside your network and if they wanted to, they could scoop up all of the LAN traffic.
On top of that, some of them even portion out wireless to people outside your network from the router you're paying for while increasing attack surface.
The big tech companies, the providers, the government and foreign adversaries are winning bigtime. It does feel like there's a little bit of hope that people are wising up about AI exploding privacy and security risks, so more people are thinking about the dumbest things which have become the norms.