I use an amazon fire tv 4k, I only use it to start jellyfin. It's perfect.
If you don't want it to phone home, put it behind a firewall, and block all but your domains
Even worse. Many apps have google signature instead of the developers. They upload their key and give it to google. Horrible practice. Nowadays, fdroid gravitates towards reproducible builds with the dev's own signature and google is going the other way round. Gravitating towards an unsafe "best practice" ...
If that's of your concern, you can't download the play store version either. It is the same app, has the same signature.
Thats not a random apk
Another intepretation: one uses data to distinguish between popular and crappy stores.
Let's say I work in an IT area (but not infosec)
I published some packages under MIT a couple of years ago. It is difficult to understand at first, I was happy with the license because anyone could use it like they want.
Today, I understand that I want to use GPL. With GPL everyone can use the code like they want and I can use their code like I want.
Firefox can display x265. Do you use the flatpak version? If so, create a bug report.
If not, search for enable x265 on firefox and install the codecs.
Whats the log in plex?
There is a very easy solution. Don't buy apple.
The longer you use linux excluslively, you don't think about windows or mac. You think about fedora or suse, kde or gnome, yay or apt, distrobox or toolbox.
I don't own one but I agree, it ist very good. But it's too expensive for what it is nowadays. A second hand one or maybe the next generation might be worth it again