I think you have the wrong conclusion with Alexa’s skills and ecosystem, as a prior heavily bought-in Alexa user myself. It did feel like magic in the beginning

I think you have the wrong conclusion with Alexa’s skills and ecosystem, as a prior heavily bought-in Alexa user myself. It did feel like magic in the beginning and was a quality of life improvement if you automated repetitive task of daily life e.g. auto light/thermostat activation. I never needed it to add stuff to my Amazon shopping cart or interpret things I said as voice shopping asks, which was a terrible UX. There were so many other daily frustrations and Alexa skills that were half baked and random frequently resetting or going offline. Another frustration was Alexa failing to recognize the magic incantation to activate a simple action in the day to day when skills had overlapping utterances. I actually wished Siri had better HomeKit IoT products so I could switch over, but I just gave up out of death by a thousand cuts wearing me down over the years and do everything manually now. Privacy and surveillance was also a huge tipping point to make me bin all my Alexa devices. I digress…