The 'r' word is considered a slur and is NOT nice...Please. be(e) nice at Beehaw. Thanks.

Calling names without understanding what’s actually going on is always a great start.

"Smart" seems to just mean internet connected. Basically all TV watching (at least in my experience) has moved to streaming, so you need a connection somewhere. Either TVs have it built in (and show you ads in the output selection menu – I’ve seen this) or you connect something else to it that streams content. The Fire TV stick was a cheap way to do this, Fire TVs are cheap TVs.

I’ve been using an Apple TV and capped the wifi connection of my TV, works great and no ads.

From the article, it sounds like this affects people with a dumb TV who use some kind of hardware gizmo that Amazon sells to be a streaming endpoint.

I think that it's really more linked with streaming services than with smart TVs.