And all this stuff could work directly locally, it'd even make alternatives possible and it'd be an immensely better experience. It would eliminate the latency it takes for the requests to reach halfway across the world and back. It would also eliminate a lot of the privacy and security concerns.
What makes it worse is that these cloud connections also tend to be insecure and unreliable or both. I've seen multiple vendors (including Miele) make unencrypted connections to their cloud. (Try blocking port 80 outgoing on your firewalls.)
I've also set up a bit of monitoring for a few appliance manufacturer's clouds - these cloud services have outages all the damn time. To an extent it makes sense given that nobody is explicitly paying for them. On the other hand it's a terrible omen for the longevity of such services. (I can't wait to buy an expired appliance manufacturer's domain.)
I can't imagine a solution to this mess either besides legislation, like forcing some open access at least on EOL.
I'm hoping that the Matter protocol will help with local home automation. It is designed to work on the local network using IPv6 networking, with gateway between Wifi and Thread. The downside is that it is complicated from everybody involved in design.
The goal is that device companies will want to get rid of cost of developing cloud software, and effectively outsource it to Apple, Google, etc.
Apple's tempo so far has been abysmal, so I wouldn't hold my breath. We can hope though.
Unencrypted protocols basically are open access. It's easy to reverse engineer, and then you can just point the DNS address of their cloud at your server to make it work locally (or worst case hijack their IP). It's the encrypted connections that you need to be wary of.