If the box where I can’t set up a third party player to do the ‘replay last 5 seconds with subtitles on’ because it’s all locked down is the best then I don’t want to know what the worst is, I’ll just keep using LibreElec. At least if LibreElec does something I don’t like Claude can fix it.
The Apple TV (hardware) can do what you're asking using a voice command "What did he/she say". It's possible it no longer works in every app because services insist on writing their own players that don't work as well as the player provided by Apple TV.
I use LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi 4, though it doubtless also works well on a Pi 5 (and the cheapest one with 1 GB of RAM is probably plenty).
It does great with local [networked] media and that's all I use it for. There's a million plugins for other things, some dating back to the XBMC days on the OG Xbox 20+ years ago, that others may find utility in... but for regular commercialized streaming I just use a $25 Chromecast and that does the business well-enough.
(LibreElec has a huge advantage to me that most people probably don't care about: My AV receiver sounds brilliant and was once very expensive [~$4,500], but it's rather old and it chokes on HDMI signals higher than 1080i. It is also unable to decode things like Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, and DTS-HD.
This would make the receiver a non-starter for post-Blu-Ray film soundtracks, except the Pi4 has two HDMI outputs. It is a no-effort built-in for LibreElec to use one of these outputs for video, while the other one is dedicated to high-res multichannel PCM audio.
In this way: The video system gets whatever video signals it wants, while the audio system is just fed PCM audio and doesn't have to struggle with any of that more-modern business at all. Everything is very happy with this arrangement.)
A cheap Android TV box. Between lack of proper hardware acceleration for 4K/Dolby Vision decoding and lack of sleep(!) support, I would never recommend that hardware, the ones that are actually recommended by the community are RP5 ($$$) and especially Intel Nx00 (N100 etc.) which are actually the gold standard of mainline(-ish in case of RPi) codec and hardware support.
