Disregarding the fucking awful campaign against them because some 3rd party developers make piracy-focused add-ons, as someone who never owned a smart TV, Kodi seems pretty feature-compatible.
Look into LibreELEC, I use that and buy android tv boxes. You can dual boot, LibreELEC from an SD and android from NAND. It's stable enough that I've began to just flash nand and run soley LibreELEC, but you'll be limited from the wide availability of android support for most major content providers apps
the ones from the vendors are all closed source. Best bet is to buy a good TV and use another device to run software that makes it "smart" - ie. AOSP / Kodi
The only thing to gain from "smart tvs" are apps that can be controlled w/ the TV remote, if you're privacy coincious, you should know by now that it will take a bit of effort to secure your data.
