I don't understand the IoT craze. My light switches work just fine, and if I really wanted to operate them remotely, I'd just get a clapper. A clapper is a lot more convenient than pulling out my smartphone and poking at the screen. I don't want my Roomba sending iRobot information about my home to sell to data brokers. I don't want my refrigerator telling my insurance company how much cheese I eat.

But suppose I wasn't a neoluddite and I was easily excited by digital salt shakers. As it stands, all of these products could be using wifi, which would still give me, the consumer, the ability to firewall them. That would let me access them on my LAN without letting them talk on the internet. The idea of putting 5G radios in them instead of wifi radios seems to be to deprive me, the consumer, of the opportunity to firewall them.

You are looking at IoT the same way some folks looked at the internet and smartphone at its inception. Demographics will change and so will the perception of people. It is possible that IoT will help refrigerators be less energy intensive depending on the produce inside, that heaters in cars and homes will turn on only when a family member is arriving at home, that food will be heated before you arrive home. The list of possibilities go on and on. The individual/companies will have to decide the amount they will trade for the IoT benefits they get.

When I come home, I can have food heated up for me already. It's called a slow cooker. I don't need a 5G radio in my slow cooker for that to work. And what a 5G radio can't do is get the meat balls out of my freezer and into that slow cooker. Similarly thermostats on timers are older than cell phones.

If you want an automatically adjusting fridge, that can and should be implemented without the cell radio too. Put a RFID chips in food packaging that requests a particular temperature; the fridge then sets itself to the lowest temperature requested. A fridge that instead broadcasts the contents of your fridge to some corporation that does not have your best interests at heart is an abomination, but I do not doubt that whichever corporation starts selling them will try to mask this by framing their spy devices as ecologically friendly to make it seem morally unassailable.

Agreed. Honestly, I don't understand the 5G hype. Moreover, if a device has an embedded transceiver I don't control the network it's connected too. I literally lose control over the device. Short of shutting it off or damaging the transceiver.

I already have my laptop ensuring all my lights and a space heater are off when I leave (detected by my phone's bluetooth), just in case I forgot. And this is with extremely simple plug-in outlets.

You're thinking of IoT as only personal home electronics. IoT might encompass a lot more, such as more connected fleet vehicles, infrastructure pipelines (water, gas, sewage, etc), traffic systems, and potentially a lot more.

Infrastructure can be wired, and there are only ~260 million registered road vehicles in America (most of which are not fleet vehicles.)

Infrastructure can be wired, but it is also extremely costly. Just ask Google the costs of trenching up city streets to lay new cable. True, new infrastructure could be built to handle this new cabling requirement, but then we're at the same place we're at now with such tasks being prohibitively expensive for anything currently deployed.