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Agreed. Switches for everything. Should work like you expect. Any automation/control should be optional invisible benefits.

My acquaintances bought a house from debt closure with a monitoring system. Now they have a one room with idle servers. I'm afraid to visit because they'll ask to "install windows" on every one.

People probably forget that IoT devices can be pretty expensive to yank out again. I would want to move into a home full of IoT devices configured by someone else, how do you even ensure that everything is reset and disconnected correctly.

There was an episode of the Coder Radion podcast a few years back, one of the hosts had moved into an apartment with a few smart home features, it took him forever to reset and reconfigured. He described it as "living in a haunted house".

In addition to when they don't work. What about when the company stops supporting them or just goes under? The industry never seemed to build long term trust whenever I looked into it.