You are right: SMR drives aren't suited for your needs. I can see an HA-SMR or HM-SMR drive in a (cold) storage application. Giving ZFS the logic to address such drives was proposed in 2015, and the response that Matt Ahrens had during the discussion, if I recall the video correctly, was "well, if there's a corporation that wants to pay for the development work, we're not opposed to having the code in ZFS".
So far, that particular use case - cold storage on ZFS with HA/HM-SMR drives - has not materialized. I think largely because the web scale players that use HM-SMR drives, don't use ZFS.
And yes, WD dropped the ball. The resulting loss of trust is entirely their own doing.
I will continue to use (shucked) WD drives because I like the lower rotational speeds for home use. I care about heat and noise. And, I think that defaulting to N300 or Ironwolf is an understandable response to WD's actions here. I dodged a bullet when I built my NAS because I went with 8TB shucked, but the thought that I might have gone 6TB and ran squarely into SMR is unpleasant.
I foresee that I'll only buy drives to replace failed ones, going forward. I have 18TiB free, assuming 75% max pool utilization. I don't see myself adding more than half a TiB yearly, there aren't that many 4k BluRays I actually want to own. Which means this pool will last me for the next 20-40 years. That's my remaining lifetime.
I'd have to find a whole new use case, beyond media storage and PC backup, to need more than I built. That may well happen. I don't see it from here. Maybe 8k becomes a must-have thing in my lifetime, but I'm not seeing that either.