Those who are old enough remember that the Internet is just one example of an internet. Quoting Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_of_Internet#The...): "The Internet standards community historically differentiated between an internet, as a short-form of an internetwork, and the Internet: treating the latter as a proper noun with a capital letter, and the former as a common noun with lower-case first letter. An internet is any set of interconnected Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The distinction is evident in Request for Comments documents from the early 1980s, when the transition from the ARPANET, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, to the Internet, with broad commercial support, was in progress, although it was not applied with complete uniformity."
So an IoT is an internet of things, not necessarily the Internet of all Things.
Home automation was just an example. I take IoT to mean networked not-general-purpose devices. The internet part is meaningless. If you use that IoT device in the same server room as the controller does it become strictly LANoT? What about private overlay networks? It was never about the internet as in public accessibility.
I think the "solution" to this is some sort of open hardware system, where instead of someone manufacturing and selling for a profit, the design includes a standard set of parts you order, and then there's a very simple assembly, Ikea-style.
Home automation is a mess, IoT or not. There are standards like KNX, but the problem is the same as it was 30 years ago when the idea of home automation arose: manufacturers want captive markets and can't agree on a single standard. As a result, I can't buy any A/C unit, rolling shutter, light fixture and thermostat and just connect them to my home network, the selection of "smart" appliances is actually very limited.
I mean, home installation is thought out on the scale of decades, because renovation is a pain. People want something simple and reliable, that is the reason why some taps, switches, sockets, etc... are 10 times more expensive than others while looking the same and people still buy them. It is the complete opposite from what Silicon Valley is pushing.