I think this interpretation is a bit too negative.

You wrote a long message to say that you agree with me technically, but then said that it has good uses as well. I don't disagree with that, but the problem with these companies is - you give them one finger and they take your whole hand. Besides that,

If you don't want to locally host your smart home automations (you and I do, but the average consumer doesn't) this can be very useful. It's also really helpful if you want to access your own devices remotely over the Internet and not need to bother with port forwarding.

this implies that this is not possible with Zigbee. You can use your devices remotely with Zigbee, but it is fully governed by your Zigbee hub/coordinator. You can use Home Assistant, the IKEA hub, the Samsung SmartThings hub, Homey, etc. to control your Zigbee devices remotely. The very big, but relevant difference is that the devices themselves cannot connect to the mothership to do analytics or to lock away functionality. There were already some Thread + Matter devices that required talking to the manufacturer's servers to get all functionality (I think e.g. some Nuki devices, but I might misremember).

If you don't want your devices reaching out to the Internet (like I don't), the solution is to put all that stuff on its own VLAN with no Internet access (which I do).

Putting Thread + Matter devices on a different VLAN than e.g. your phone which you are commissioning it with is very fragile. So fragile that most Matter documentation just says "your phone needs to be on the same WiFi network as your smarthome hub". It is possible (I had such a setup for a while), but requires that you e.g. do allow mDNS advertisements across VLANs (since Matter relies heavily on mDNS). Since you are talking about average consumers, Zigbee will give them privacy without any extra work, whereas with Thread + Matter they have to set up their network in a way that their ISP-provided router most likely doesn't even support.

Thread + Matter has no point outside very large deployments and giving a bunch of companies the opportunity to start data mining your sensor data as well.

> If you don't want your devices reaching out to the Internet (like I don't), the solution is to put all that stuff on its own VLAN with no Internet access (which I do).

Or, if there is already a perfectly functioning open standard that just works and it's private by default (ZigBee) boycott the new standard created and forced upon us by BigTech and don't buy that hardware.

It's annoying but it is possible; it comes down to allowing mdns broadcast across vlans and adding a static route for the border router

I used this guide if you're interested - https://ndo.dev/blog/hassio-thread-setup/, it's been working without fuss.

I am curious what Zigbee devices you bought. We have over 50 Zigbee devices and never had any issue. It is just super reliable and always works.

In contrast, Matter + Thread devices in our network drop out very frequently (and no, I am not using multi-PAN, etc.).

Matter + WiFi devices are probably much more reliable (if close enough to an AP), but a security and privacy nightmare.

That’s not the case at all. Matter over thread is newer. The latest range of ikea smart home stuff is all thread.

Thread has the advantage of consuming very low power so battery powered sensors and remotes can run for years. Wifi is only used because it doesn’t require buying a thread border router.

Matter is not the network layer. You are either talking about Thread (which uses IEEE 802.15.4 like Zigbee) or WiFi. Matter is the application layer protocol.

We have a lot of devices and never have any issues. But yeah, if you put a lot of Tuya Zigbee devices with crappy firmware that flood the network. Similarly if you put a lot of crappy WiFi devices on your network, it's a security nightmare (wise people put them on an isolated VLAN and use WiFi client isolation).