Like I mentioned in an earlier comment, their power is roughly on par with a 2012-2014 low-to-midrange smartphone, which sits somewhere between 5-15% a powerful as a modern midrange-and-up smartphone.

That would be fine if they were rendering to a 720p screen or had much more simplistic menus like the those found on most A/V receivers, but they’re usually running recent-ish Android or something similar, which has fancy graphics and animations all over the place designed for newer devices which make that hardware choke at the 4K resolution that the majority of TVs now ship with. Exacerbating this are the terrible lowest-bidder smart TV apps which are written terribly.

TV manufacturers will never ship an OS more suitable for the hardware though, because they’re concerned that it will make the TV look less modern than competing TVs. They also won’t ship better hardware because that’d cut $5 per unit off of their margins. As such, it’s best to just write off integrated “smarts” and plug in a streaming box that’s not so anemic.

The Netflix app ran fine at first but had outgrown my 2018 smart TV's IQ by 2022. Freezes for a good moment then crashes the TVOS. Hulu as well. Factory reset was a waste of time and fixed nothing. But TCL made a few bucks more going with the cheaper cpu and accelerated obsolescence. One more reason to get a dumb display...