I'm cool with it provided I can use it as a very high quality HDMI display. Then I just got a nicely discounted product.
My worry is if they demand connectivity in order to work as a display. Or worse come with some kind of LTE transceiver to phone home then we're in trouble.
Most will work --- but not always *conveniently*.
On power up, a lot them will launch into setup if connectivity is not configured. Some may actually store/retrieve the TV configuration in their cloud.
So the main concern with keeping it in dumb mode I would think is that they could still snoop in on your streams through the plain old HDMI port.
But if the HDMI is encrypted.....
With their antipiracy standard ....
God that would be amazing.
Also, I'm kind of surprised there isn't a raspberry pi open source project that does what those 20$ Roku fobs do.
Finally ... It kind of shows that hardware hacking is going downhill that there isn't a replacement os for the major brands of smart TVs. It's possible they've locked that down, but also the price points are so low you'd think they don't have the money to keep them out.
So they snoop. There's no value to be had in it if they can't report back to the mother ship. Without a line of communication, the "personalized" ads premise fails.