There's probably big differences between apps, but for me at least the "Discover" option is the one where I get these worthless recommendations. I have simply unpinned everything from my home screen except for the libraries from my local Plex server so I never see any recommendations anymore beyond what I have in my library.

What's your TV OS?
There are clients for Android TV and WebOS (which I use).
Additionally there are clients for desktop OSs, Roku, Android and IOS.
Works great.

That's not VLC organising anything, that's you doing what you can to get around its shortcomings. Also how did you organise them? Alphabetically? By release date? Genre? Director name? Did you make multiple catalogues with hardlinks so you could do more than one of the above with your 1990s era sorting system?

You can watch your own local media if the internet is down. The Plex app works just fine for local functions without internet. You lose the ability to lookup media metadata online, add new media to your server (since this relies on online metadata matching for organisation purposes), the ability to switch users, and to remotely access your media from outside your local network (obviously). But everything else works fine.

You spent time to download several distro, put them on a USB stick, then try them. Then you spent time bitching on a tech forum about a non-issue (I mean the fact that all you hardware worked at some point is the proof that the drivers exists) ...
A bit of search or just asking the question on a forum would have gave you an easy answer:
1 - get the device id using lspci or lsusb
2- go to http://linux-hardware.org/ enter the device id and get the driver needed.
3- install that driver
That's 5 minutes top in most of the cases ....

DLNA is an absolute shitshow. To say it's not as "rich of a UI" is a complete understatement. Yeah the last time we ran a story on Plex someone recommended Jellyfin and I gave it a try. Try is all I could because after spending a weekend on it I couldn't get it working reliably with my TV and went back to using the Plex app.

Jellyfin needs a decent front end and needs to be pushed to the app stores of several smart TV manufacturers. The backend already seems to be quite decent.

If you do IT for a living you'd understand corporate CoPilot and what is being pushed to consumers are not remotely the same thing. As it stands Microsoft's Azure already handles plenty of confidential and sensitive information for Fortune 500s. If this feature concerns you then your corporation shouldn't be running Windows PERIOD!.

These idle threats are getting tiresome. If you actually thought switching to Linux was viable for you you'd have done it by now. Your privacy is being raped over and over again, and you keep saying "thank you madam may I have another" all the while saying the *next* thing they do will be the final straw.

Switch now, or don't. But stop virtue signalling. Tell us when you've done something, rather than simply lying to yourself and others.

Farms have cows.
Cows produce hot gas.
This guy also produces hot gas.

The link is clear.

For those here complaining that all they want is to watch their own media from their own server, may I suggest you check out Kodi https://kodi.tv/ ?
It does just that, and in my experience very well.

Plex and Emby and Jellyfin are for streaming content. Do you even want streaming?

If you just want a 10-foot media player for content on your own NAS/local server, that's where Kodi excels.

I don't mean the dodgy "Kodi boxes" you see sold on Ebay (occasionally) and certain shady online stores. These come with not just Kodi preinstalled, but a bunch of plugins to dodgy streaming services. I mean the Open Source software. Be a good Slashdotter and download and install a clean copy of Kodi yourself, and have easy, local, private access to your own media. You can choose whether to pick a binary or if you prefer to build it yourself.

And if you want to track your what you've watched across multiple installations around the house, you can shift its library not to a cloud service, but to your local mysql installation.

There is a plugin system for additional functionality; if you want to stream across the Internet, either to your living room or from your living room to your hotel, it can be done. That takes Kodi into competition with Plex. Heck, there's even a Plex plugin for Kodi. But for basic CIFS or NFS access to your own media on your own server in your own home, from a beautiful and user friendly 10-foot interface, it does an excellent job in a default install.

thats their stupid fault, they'll soon learn though

Insofar as they are not NSA-mandated, yes.

I hope you do not ever get any responsibilities for IT security, because that is the most dumb statement I have ever heard in that space.