You just have to stay away from the cheap junk when it comes to alarm systems. It’s part of my job, and an alarm system simply costs money. With the 2-300 euros that you pay in the store, you do not have a system from which you can expect much. A good alarm system costs several times, and of course there is nothing wireless and dependence on cloud environments.

It just depends on what kind of system you want. If you want an all-in, it almost certainly comes with an NVR and you can easily pay over 1,000€ for a setup with multiple cameras.

We ourselves have 2 light cams at home that go out over Wi-Fi and work pretty smoothly. Having color photos especially at night is great, just in case something happens.
Just enter a static IP address and turn on port forwarding, otherwise you won’t be able to view it remotely. Recording to MicroSD always goes well and downloading photos works just fine (if you know how). The only drawback of these cameras is that the web page is based on Flash … But the price is also there (135 euros – each). The advantage is that the cameras support ONVIF and can reasonably compete with Dahua cameras and others.

In my opinion, if you choose this type of product, you should not specify any requirements and you should not be surprised if it suddenly stops working. A true alarm always works independently, and nowadays it has access to the cloud that you can manage yourself. But if that doesn’t work, you can always go ahead local.

People want the convenience of OOBE; Unpacking, connection setup and you’re done. They don’t want to dig into the settings to turn on a separate camera via ONVIF, for example. Or they have to set up port forwarding on their router, as they don’t know the admin password.
That’s why people like Nest cameras or other manufacturers make them; Few steps and everything works. Simply link your cameras to your account and it “looks” professional. They don’t have to do anything themselves for the recordings, because they are kept by the manufacturer anyway.

I agree with you that it has to work independently and the only way to manage it “cloud” is through port forwarding or via VPN. But once you go in that direction, you really need some knowledge about security, networking, and the product itself. Something most people don’t want to spend their time on, because they have “something better” to do.

Everything cloud related to the consumer will be discontinued at some point, because otherwise it would cost the manufacturer a lot of money to continue supporting legacy models. In addition, you can expect that also with cloud-enabled devices, a hack will happen there as well, and the site can then be viewed quite easily via the public IP address.
Anyway, the costs don’t outweigh the benefits for most people, so these types of products remain popular…