For now, because it still sounds cool and futuristic, but if the whole audience of HN is already rejecting smart devices wholesale, that's a bellwether the industry might want to consider before the attitude percolates out to public at large.

Or...there are engineers who realize this regardless of hacker news and push better design factors by communicating customer needs and impact on branding. Hacker news is not as influential as we may believe.

The public at large does not care what we think.

Of course not, but they care when the stuff they buy bricks within a few years.

Sadly, unless we as engineers, or ideally some broader body promotes some standard of device independence -- customers will eventually reject all such devices regardless of where they reside on the spectrum of cripple-able <---> independent.