My old speaker now plays in perfect sync with my Sonos through Home Assistant, and all it took was a $69 device

A lot of perfectly good speakers are otherwise hard to integrate in a smart home, and even if they were smart for their time, they're often left stuck with whatever features they shipped with. Those features frequently don't age nearly as well as the speakers do, and the Huawei Sound X that I use at home is a good example of that. It sounds fantastic, but getting music onto it over a network relies on DLNA, and that can be a bit messy.