One reason may be that since it doesn't require a cloud, there's no personal data to mine. Try getting VC without a recurring revenue stream. It's probably possible but it's more difficult. Same story for IoT: Cloudless home automation is trivial from a technical point of view, but cloudless home automation is a non-starter VC-wise.
This was a field with multiple products on the market. How much VC do you need to deliver benchmarks of shipping software?
Similarly, saying cloudless home automation is easy sounds like you’re leaving out a lot of experience other people gained about the challenges of getting consumer adoption with the need to take on 24x7 server maintenance, connectivity challenges blocking popular features, etc. which made that class of products less appealing to most customers.
