There are "universal scaler" boards which are free of this "smartness" and yet have a tuner and other multimedia features you'd want in a TV, and are also quite cheap:
I wonder how popular a service for "upgrading" TVs with those would be. Market it as "spyware delete" and I suspect you might get a lot of business... possibly to the point of causing the manufacturers to take offensive action.
https://mysku.club/blog/aliexpress/67872.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre... (translation of above into English)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tst5Xmh3q-A
I wonder how popular a service for "upgrading" TVs with those would be. Market it as "spyware delete" and I suspect you might get a lot of business... possibly to the point of causing the manufacturers to take offensive action.