If you want actually pretty good smart home stuff, and for cheap, go to IKEA. By default they require nothing but being paired to a button/dial/motion sensor that works entirely on a local mesh network (Zigbee, or more recently Matter over Thread) between the devices. You can buy a hub, which again by default is local only - to control the lights using your phone you need to be connected to your own wifi. And if you really want to control them from somewhere else (or use Siri/Google Assistant etc), you have to specifically enable that functionality.
And because they use matter, they work with most of the other matter stuff, and vice versa - I have a bunch of Aqara temp/humidity sensors connected to mine. And you don’t even need an IKEA hub, any Matter hub will work, and there are quite a few of them including stuff like the Google Home Speaker, a 3rd gen Apple TV, and the Apple Home Pod.
Main downside? IKEA electronics aren’t exactly the most reliable things around.
The questionnaire first asks you if AI was used yes/no, and if you say yes it then asks you to describe in detail how and for what, and for many devs the first thing to do is to try to highlight all the important parts that it wasn’t.