That only means they might eventually stop fulfilling their primary function. But they might remain plugged in and serve as bot without anyone noticing for years.

Very true. While I had assumed that most people would toss their gadgets once their functionality had been disabled, I wouldn't buy a new fridge or other appliance just because I can't load cat pics on it anymore.

Depends on the appliance. Your fridge will probably work when disconnected from the cloud. Your LED lightbulbs? I can imagine them getting bricked. I know of one laser cutter, featured some time ago on HN, that becomes a very big paperweight when disconnected from the Internet...

While this is a case of "two wrongs make a right"[0] - anything that provides even some value without the backend up will still be connected, perennially at risk of getting taken over by a bad actor.

[0] And a pretty strong argument against "forever" IoT devices.

Maybe the solution is some sort of prepaid credit for a cloud computing network? like lambda or something. That would at least shift the burden of staying running.