You can install it without an account, plug in an antenna and go to town. You can even connect it to wifi then use Youtube or Netflix. Haven't seen any funky ads.
My only peeve is that the controller doesn't have a full number pad which makes it a little derpy for the older generation.
I found this list of TVs that have ads or not[0], and the first item in the list with ads was a TCL Roku, accompanied with a screenshot of a Home Screen background ad[1]
My only annoyance with TCL is that once you connect it to the internet, and then disconnect it, the activity light (a quite bright, white light on mine) will flash constantly. Forever.
Solvable by tape, but doing that blocks the IR sensor.
I also went the tape route for that reason; haven't really noticed an issue with the IR sensor. Ended up configuring a firewall rule via OpenWRT that keeps it working on the LAN but not the WAN, so I can still use my phone as a remote with RoMote or the official app, and it's offline (still will blink though, hence the tape).
Nice thing about OpenWRT is being able to block homescreen ads when the TV is online with the adblock package since DNS filtering will do the trick fortunately.
You can take off the back plastic with a screw driver and disconnect the light if you want. Modern TVs are actually pretty modular. You can unhook the roku board, the t-con board, the speakers and multiple other things pretty easily. They are just wires with plastic clip connectors, a lot like a PC.
This is not a rationalization for garbage design, but at least it isn't as much of a black box as people might think.
You can install it without an account, plug in an antenna and go to town. You can even connect it to wifi then use Youtube or Netflix. Haven't seen any funky ads.
My only peeve is that the controller doesn't have a full number pad which makes it a little derpy for the older generation.