They may be labeled as smart, but they’re not nerfed at all if you don’t connect to the internet. And there are no notifications or interruptions trying to get you to connect. You can even just hook it up to a set of rabbit ears and set ‘antenna TV’ is your default mode and every time you turn the TV on it’ll go right to over-the-air programs. I’m a big fan, obviously, as I hate smart devices.
Edit: grammar.
Because society wants smart TVs. You and a lot of people here don’t, but collectively, people like the idea of having Netflix/Hulu/etc right on their TVs. The cat’s out of the bag now. If you/me want a dumb TV, don’t look at consumer TVs in BestBuy, but expect to be spending over $1000.
Does society really want that or does it not realize that it doesn't have to be this way?
The alternative is a separate box (or something like a Fire Stick). But those became less of a thing once TV manufacturers started implementing them inside the box. And with that, it’s one less thing to buy (which consumers like).
If you tell customers that two TVs are identical except one doesn’t need a dongle for Netflix and is cheaper, they’ll choose the smart one.
That may be true, but you only need a ~10% share of the market to want a privacy-first (i.e. dumb) TV, and that'll at least keep the others in line. Sort of like the role Mozilla ought to play in the browser market.
They do... It is called "monitor".
Monitors and TV encode signals much, much differently.
They used to. Do they still?
yes, if you want to watch broadcast channels on a monitor you will need a tuner/amplifier converter box to do so
Are those tuners full of bloatware, ads and telemetry like Samsung's or android TV's?