My take is two fold: 1- Marketing over selling their product (common practice) 2- The “always listening” devices are mainly their Smart Remotes that have a microphone built in.

#2 Seems the most likely as is a device fully in their control and can pull as much ad marketing / information gathering details from it as they want.

Agreed. I used to be able to rely on adding “reddit” to my Google searches to get relevant and insightful information. That still works today (soon after the exodus), but the information there will slowly age out of relevance. By the time they figure that out it’ll be to late for them to pull out.