> Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at your device five times before anything happens.

I don't know about Google Home or Siri, but my Alexa easily handles my broad Norwegian accent the vast majority of the time.

There are a few things (e.g. weird album titles) that are more likely to cause problems, but in my experience the things that it has problems with are rarely accent related as when something is problematic my son who does not have a comparable accent runs into the same misrecognition.

(EDIT: I have no doubt that there are accents it will have problems with - my point is that you certainly don't need to have perfect pronunciation for this any more)

> While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary).

That requires finding the remote first. You may be organized enough for that never to be an issue. I've given up on the normal remote and rely exclusively on apps now, but that also involves grabbing my phone or tablet and a couple extra steps.

> (4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people.

That's fine. They don't need to be usable everywhere. I have no interest in using one on my phone in public for example. But I like having one in my living room, and I rarely have enough people around that it's a problem. In my experience with it so far, people have already learned to hush down automatically when they hear you give the keyword (but I do agree that won't work with a lot of people present - it works with a few people around).