It’s bricked as soon as a company is bought up, and the new company has no interest in continuing support or wants customers to buy a new or their product. The lawsuits are non existent, because due to forced arbitration clauses present in almost all contracts today, you cannot sue. The most prominent, recent example being Disney not allowing a customer to sue them for a death in their park, because the dead person has used a free trial of Disney+ and therefore agreed to forced arbitration. Video by Louis Rossmann. (Generally, Louis covers a lot of such cases and maintains a wiki where the cases and companies are collected.) Also, there’s no way to just buy from another manufacturer and be happy, because it’s all of them. And the shareholders, which are the only ones that are relevant for what a company does, do not care if they damage the reputation and run the company into the ground long-term, as long as the numbers went up quickly (from forcing subscriptions, ads and/or tracking onto customers, or discontinuing a product in favor of another one. With a normal TV, you now have an outdated but working product, as neither HDMI, cable TV nor satellite will randomly change or need updates. Something connecting to the internet and requiring permanent security updates for apps and OS does. So either you will suddenly lose most functionality, the manufacturer (or rather, new owner) sees this as a good way to justify just bricking it or the new owners will first implement forced arbitration if not present already (which you have to accept, otherwise you can’t use the product), force said subs/ads/tracking, then rugpull and close the manufacturer. Good luck suing against suing against a company that does not exist anymore, and disallows you to sue.
Paid a few million for a company, got that worth in trained workers, customers to scam and already collected data, and got many more millions from implementing said stuff. Bottomline: “Earned” many, many millions. Bonus: There’s a good chance the consumer buys a new TV from you, because they don’t know who fucked them.

All of those things are real cases, more or less common, documented in thousands of videos of Louis.

Most people I’ve met have streaming services set up on their laptop already. From start to finish, plugging in your Laptop and typing soap2day.pe or netflix.com is much easier than connecting to wifi or ethernet, installing the app on the TV, and logging in. Just to disover that streaming service XY is not available on the TV due to an old OS, license issues, compatibility issues (as eg. Netflix has special requirements, such as x86_64 and not ARM and RISCV for >720p and playing in general, iirc). On your laptop (or whatever), everything’s already set up.
That is, if you have a laptop or similar of course.