I think people just stopped using the buzzword IoT/Internet of Things even though there are many more devices in use now than before. Just a few years ago Amazon echo was just a curiosity, and now connected speakers are everywhere. I have 70+ smart switches and outlets in my house, and even my hot tub has internet connected sensors measuring water quality. Nearly all of my neighbors have a smart doorbell, internet camera, or smart lock. And these are just the obvious examples. Self driving cars are loaded with sensors that send data back to the mothership all day long. I'm not sure of the dollar amount to put on all of that, but IoT is alive and kicking.

This. I'm working in that space and I can tell you it is very much alive. It all comes down to ease-of-use and cost of sensors. 2018 has seen especially some fantastic progress. There's still a lot of low hanging fruit to capture.

But people have stopped using the word IoT or SmartAnything and that is a good thing

It has gone deep in the ITU. Go look at "digital object identifiers" and follow ITU study group links.

What I hear of in large-scale IoT is that its big private networks using back end stuff in Amazon, GCE, whatever, to feed big collections of things, but they don't appear up-front in the global net, they run behind doors.

Exactly, it's still very much active and widely investigated, thrown money at. Large companies are developing and testing out their own IoT solutions behind closed doors. Just recently saw an invite from some university study group trying to get their project funded. They were looking into IoT for farming and hospitals. This segment is definitely growing, maybe not very public at the moment, but it's going to be soon.