Exactly.
I am an embedded Developer with over three decades of paid experience. Do these people really think someone like me (or me) doesn't realize that technically, these devices could be considered a "computing device"?
But, the less fanatical among us nerds, you know, the ones that don't have to prove that they are "smart enough" to get Linux to run on their toaster, just because they can say they did it (woohoo), realize that these are still, at the end of the day, Appliances with an Embedded microcontroller, or System-on-Chip, inside.
So, with that in mind, is a device with a mask-programmed microcontroller a "computer"? You can't run arbitrary code on it. Isn't the microcontroller just another form of ASIC at that point? You can't install Linux on it, any more than you can do so on your Cat. Yet inside that MCU, it's the same CPU core, same RAM, same peripherals, running the same instruction set. The only difference is that it has been built with a last-mask that happens to have a printed pattern on it that causes the part to act as a particular state-machine. But is it a "computer". No, it is not.
So please quit trying to Impress yourselves by declaring just any-old-thing that happens to have an MCU in it a "computer". Because, in just a very few decades (when it will be even harder to find anything that isn't an Embedded System), people will simply look at you like you're daft, punks.