The general public didn't have a reason to distrust the devices. Snowden, Assange, email scandals and general overbearing decisions from tech companies black-holing things has shown the average joe there could be a problem.

Combine that with a general rise in authoritarianism and living outside of the US where these tech companies are based.. I can see the problems arising.

It's a fair point... unless a device has a hardware mute switch, it's hard to know for sure if somebody can activate it remotely for listening. But why add more attack vectors unnecessarily?

Everyone in my house finds the Echo convenient. It is not a big deal, but neither is our threat model. There is no profit to anyone in spying on our kitchen. I'm much more wary of devices that radios, GPS and cameras, but I still use those too since they are even more convenient.