I’ve found Bluetooth to be much more reliable in the presence of obstructions and interference. Learned this the hard way when I tried to put a computer behind my TV.
Same here. Been using Bluetooth heavily for about 10 years with no problems I can recall. Certainly far more reliable than wi-fi where devices and routers frequently need restarting for no obvious reason.
The only drawback to Bluetooth is range. In my house it's effectively limited to one partial intervening wall - anything more and the signal fades fast.
What if your neighbor ducked right outside your window and constantly set your TV to <undesirable TV network here>? Then you might care. With IR, the signal would be iffy and probably not work at all from the window outside and your neighbor would have to have line-of-sight with the sensor on your TV which means popping the remote up from under his hiding place. With Bluetooth, neighbor-interference is much less complex.
At my last job we designed a lot of wireless devices. One problem we saw frequently was that in high population-density areas, e.g., apartment buildings in NYC, Bluetooth was often useless because there was simply so much interference from so many devices in a small space.
Wired communication definitely still has its place.
Not using a wireless communication method reduces the chances that electronic interference will cause a problem. Obviously there's no way to completepy prevent issues but it's not so hard to implement things such that a misbehaving Bluetooth (or whatever) radio doesn't lead to a dangerous situation.
Ironically I'm in the opposite boat where I use bluetooth almost always except for when I'm in my car and wire it to the AUX. That's probably because my car is really old but also because it's nice to not carry my phone around everywhere when I'm listening to something. With bluetooth I just leave the phone on the table and can move around the house pretty freely.
This is oversimplifying things. Bluetooth devices are typically much closer than WiFi devices, and need less bandwidth. The protocol has less overhead (on modern BT devices). It's true that implementation quality of BT devices is typically severely lacking, but with a good quality implementation (e.g. Apple AirPods with a Mac or iOS device), the WiFi is far more likely to be the weak link in a home videoconferencing setup.
You joke, but relying on bluetooth could be reasonable as a redundant system, wires can break too. Probably more as a failure detection mechanism though.
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