I mean or people smarten up and just use home assistant and hardware thats open, people buy into closed market cloud shit because its easy ... as long as people keep buying the shit taht gets sunsetted eventually it will continue to be sold.
I actually think we're pretty much there. Much like consumer ink jet printer ink, enough people have been burned that it's now increasingly common knowledge.
I agree most people don't know about Home Assistant and open ecosystem alternatives yet. I think right now most people are just wary of these Google, Amazon, Samsung, Apple (GASA) offerings and aren't adopting anything at scale beyond a few point-to-point automations.
I think (hope?) this growing wariness will deflate GASA attempts to turn proprietary home automation hubs into ongoing revenue streams. Then GASA will eventually give up on home automation when it doesn't deliver the growth metrics they want. Let's face it, none of GASA can ever be trusted as the central gatekeeper in any ecosystem they want to own for downstream monetization (whether that's ads, subscription or selling customer data).
By adopting the open Matter protocol, GASA has already given up making the inpoint and outpoint hardware proprietary (sensors, switches, plugs, etc). Instead, with Matter they're intentionally commoditizing that low-margin end of the business for Shenzen's-finest to fight over. BTW, the Matter protocol is net positive for the open ecosystem because it creates more inpoints and outpoints that are Home Assistant compatible. With the other commercial players now commoditized, GASA's goal is to just be the central cloud gatekeeper and they're content to fight each other over it. Except Home Assistant exists, is already big and is gaining even more momentum.
To be clear, I have no illusion that Home Assistant will somehow "Win" over GASA offerings. Open source platforms don't "beat" proprietary platforms in head-to-head consumer market battles, they outlive them as the only stable, sane choice still standing. I think GASA will fight each other to a standstill, preventing any one of them from gaining the dominance or lock-in they need for home automation to be a GASA-scale 'platform pillar'. Eventually they'll realize it's not strategically "core" enough, give up and move on - leaving Home Assistant as the free, open "still-works, always-worked" default central gateway.
Worst case: Google division needs revenue and decides to extract revenue after obtaining market share.
IMHO, the entire home IoT market desperately needs federal minimum mandates, strictly from a cyber security perspective.