I completely agree with every single word you’ve posted there. From the history recap to the modern era problems. These days the only thing my Echo does which

I completely agree with every single word you’ve posted there. From the history recap to the modern era problems. These days the only thing my Echo does which is remotely useful is setting named timers while cooking. So I can have my hands dirty with raw meat and ask Alexa to set various timers for each step of the meal. I found that particularly good when cooking meals that have large gaps in time between stages (like Sunday roasts when there can be 5 minutes or more between the cooking times of different vegetables). However even there it sometimes becomes more trouble than its worth when it starts mishearing names of vegetables or duration numbers when spoken. The most disappointing thing is that I spent a few days working with Alexa’s - frankly terrible - SDK to integrate it into my existing home automation (all stuff I’ve built myself and powered by a FreeBSD server). Not only was the development progress of Alexa skills amongst the most frustrating I’ve had in my ~30 years of experience writing software; but it turned out to be a complete waste of my time because Alexa is so piss poor at any interactions more complex than the very basic (as you described). It’s also very laggy at such interactions so even when it does work it feels slow. So slow, in fact, that it ends up taking longer and being more painful using the voice control than it would have been to wake my laptop from sleep and trigger the same HTTP API endpoints Alexa would used but instead doing so manually from the command line using curl. So needless to say I very quickly gave up using Alexa for home automation.