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.

> There were already some Thread + Matter devices that required talking to the manufacturer's servers to get all functionality

The most I have seen that is rather the functionality not being available in matter (ie the standard does not support it) so they are only available on zigbee with the manufacturers app.

In my personal experience

> Zigbee will give them privacy without any extra work

Was exactly as fragile and dependent on manufacturer infrastructure for some fratures as you describe MoT. (the privacy part is true though, and as mentioned all the time: I have heard others had much better experiences than me with zigbee)