What would help is not Interet-of-shittifying things that don't need to be.

There may be a sensible argument to connect these to the Internet in read-only mode (and from there, poor engineering choices leading to unintended ways to remotely control it). But there are a lot of devices where there is no good reason but everyone tries to cram WiFi and Apps just because they can or because they hope that they'll be able to abuse their users later to make an extra buck. At least those cases need to be discouraged (e.g. by making the companies liable and very publicly bankrupting a number of them).