"Apple devices can now see nearby Apple TVs using Bluetooth"
Great. Why did we need this again? Connecting to ATVs with WiFi worked fine, right? And even if BT helped my device discover the ATV or AirPlay speaker, it still needs WiFi to stream the data—so…what's the point again?
"If you turn off Bluetooth on your device, you will no longer see them."
So I have to disable an almost critical feature in order to resolve the issues I'm having with a completely useless "feature"?
"be sure to select your audio device, not the neighbor's Apple TV"
Well, yea, that's the goal, isn't it? But what about when I'm about to click on my AirPlay speaker and then my neighbor's Apple TV appears under my thumb as I'm moving in to tap it? (Because it takes a few seconds for the automagical discovery to happen.) I've accidentally tried to connect to my neighbor's ATV countless times only to receive an error that the wireless signal is too weak. Perfect! Then why am I being given the option to connect to it?!?!
"You can use this link: https://www.apple.com/feedback/ to report your problems to Apple"
LOL This one is the best joke being told in the discussion! Giving Apple feedback is useless. This is shown by the fact that this thread is almost 3 years old and this link has been posted a few times in it, with undoubtedly at least some people actually submitting this problem to Apple. And nothing has changed. We're still dealing with this absolutely preventable UX problem which was created for who knows what purpose. (See my first point.)
So here's my takeaway from this discussion:
Apple introduced a new "feature" to Apple TV to make it easier for users to connect to the device—this is assuming that connecting to it was a problem in the first place (which probably should've been fixed instead of adding another dependency to the system).
Then they enabled the new feature by default. And didn't add any options to iOS or MacOS related to this.
Now, all of my neighbor's ATVs show up on my AirPlay list even though I've never been on their network, never connected to their TV and never will. And I can't not see them.
So, assuming that my neighbor's life has been enhanced by this useless addition, I'm paying for his enhanced experience with a new pain point in my iPhone and Mac experience. Let's consider this in terms of net UX enhancement in a densely populated apartment building: if one person uses this feature on their Apple TV that's 1 user who's experience is better, while up to 16 users' (hypothetical extreme for argument's sake) experiences have just been diminished.
So Apple introducing a "better" way to connect to the Apple TV actually resulted in 16x decrease in their product's UX. I'd say Apple soiled the bed on this one and obviously has no intentions of doing anything about anytime soon probably because it falls somewhere between "water under the bridge" and "things we might consider looking into sometime in the future" on their priority list.