Only people who can afford to be stupid are stupid. You're right. People who can't afford, or otherwise choose to be frugal don't tend to fall into these traps. You'll find people who study consumer reports, read up on several companies before purchasing big products, weigh the costs and benefits of different insurance companies, phone plans, etc, frequently. It's good financial sense.

Some people do not want to put the time and effort into learning about household things. And sometimes that's OK. Even consumers who are aware of routers being rented probably don't view they are "losing $150 yearly" to Comcast or Verizon - it's a convenience for them and allows their ISP to manage upgrades, replacements, and allows lower techs for those ISPs who do house calls to debug a router (since it's what they are trained on).

Sure, run your own home cloud, but i bet the article doesn't say "consumers losing X a year because they subscribe to Dropbox" or "X a year because they pay for website hosting", when they could use a free host like github for basic html files.