Annoying, but at least it isn't feeding your information in to the weird ad-driven panopticon (we'll leave that to the content providers!)

> they just don't update?

That's a cursed scenario...

I had to do that. My Samsung couldn’t leave “demo mode” or whatever without going online first and would restart itself every hour. I just let it register and blocked it from coming out my router. It stays quiet like that. I believe removing the wifi showed some nag when booting that I had to deal with. Real scummy stuff.

Buy it from a place with free returns. Then if it insists on showing cached ads after the network is pulled (or any other undesirable behavior), just return it. This won't help you find a better model, but it will save you from needing to research these obscure details in too much depth.

. o O ( I wonder if some hostile antifeatures go away if you buy a TV in the US but then activate it from an EU IP address ).

Run it through pihole to block the ad networks? Or just whitelist hostnames/addresses one by one until the setup works.

Not exactly a user-friendly option, but an option nonetheless.

dns block it at the router