I don't think a "Smart Home" and Home Automation is the same thing

I am not sure there is a 100% accepted definition. There are many different positions on this. Some people want everything to happen automatically-- sensors everywhere, geofencing, etc. to lock/unlock doors, turn on/off lights. etc. Other people just want to sit on their ass and be able to control everything within the house from a dashboard with little automated. While there is a place for Alexa (or equivalent) in either situation, it is just another type of control. It really isn't very smart on its own.

With respect to the issue initially raised by this video, that's his own fault for not setting a proper plan in the first place and then executing it. And his assumption that Alexa is some sort of special thing is severely misguided. My system works well for me; that is not to say that it will work for others, but it satisfies my use case. Better yet, I have pretty high WAF with it.

I guess it all comes down to skill level and the types of thing a person is exposed to. I would put my HomeAssistant setup in the top 10%, and there are some things I run on the cloud. But I also have a segregated network behind pfsense with white listed firewall rules and intrusion detection. Most of my automations revolve around security, this it true. But I also have automations that do things like pull gas prices from api's of the gas stations I buy gas from. I built a app inside homeassistant that tracks my mileage over onstare and by me logging every time I fill-up on gas and reminds me when to do service and give me data, like how much I spend on gas, gas milage, operating cost ect. When i click a button to log fill-up homeassistant pulls my location off gps, sees what gas station im at, pulls the price per gallon from api off the gas stations website and prefill the filed, stuff like that. I have another automation that tracks my work hours and is accurate +/- 30min over 14 days just off gps location and bluetooth connections from my phone and GMC truck. Might sound simple, but its about 934 lines of code to be exact. There were a lot of edge cases I had to account for. ¯\(ツ)/¯ I even use the voice thing but mostly just over android auto while im driving, like hey google, set security alarm armed/away. Which enables the cameras IN my house through BlueIris and arms my honeywell vista 20p. I integrated google assistant into homeassistant using google assistants SDK, but now that they are switching to Gemini Im going to have to revisit that since Gemini is smart enough to know it shouldn't have access to things like security alarms.

I feel less and less people use Google Home and Alexa now. The fact that the mics are always on and transferring data to those companies is disturbing. Then there was what they can do when you have your home automation dependent on their service. I remember there was this one situation where there was an amazon driver dropping off a package and the home owners doorbell camera said something which the driver thought was racial. The home owners devices that were dependent on Alexa got turned off by Amazon so lights, thermostats, etc no longer worked. If we as consumers are okay with stuff like this then I don't know what to say. I get it that not everyone has the knowledge to set something up where all of these services are hosted locally on site like with Home Assistant but how much privacy do you want to give up for a little convenience?