If it has a headphone jack, you can plug in a dummy aux port. I'm convinced that the removal of the headphone jack was to ensure the microphones are always reachable
Everytime I see stuff like this I'm thankful most of my devices (hopefully all one day) either have cameras/microphones that have hardware kill switches (HKS), or can be unplugged from the device
Its funny because in the US, there are regulations that make it such that, even if they have the capability to close the doors remotely and anti pinch sensors etc, they are not allowed to unless it is done by someone from a device nearby while they hold down the close button.
Before HomeAssistant, OpenHab was the undisputed king. I still like them because they let you remotely access you home without having to subscribe to anything or set up any remote access methods
I set up Debian as my NAS and gaming tower. Drives are paired by capacity in RAID, it uses BTRFS, they are pooled together, and have one LUKS password that unlocks them with the main OS drive.
With Samba share, some podman containers, Tailscale, it does everything I need it to. Since I also use it as a desktop computer, I don't really have dashboards since I already typically sit in front of it, or can remote desktop in. I occasionally check the health of the drives, and use ECC memory/motherboard
You can connect Ollama and cloud providers like ChatGPT into OVOS/Neon, so that when you ask questions it doesn't know how to handle, it can respond using the LLM.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/KartaView