I absolutely see the security side of it, but I would assume that could be solved quite easily by having some kind of “on/off” switch combined with only allowing manually verified connections.

I mean, we basically have this for bluetooth, where I can connect to pretty much any bluetooth device, and just confirm or deny the connection request. It surprises me that some similar protocol hasn’t been invented for wifi, where I could see other machines on the network (like you can see nearby bluetooth devices), and send a connection request that the owner of that device can accept or deny. Any machine connected to the internet is already “wide open” in the sense that it’s constantly receiving loads of wireless data from all across the globe. We’ve been able to standardise that in a “safe enough” way, I don’t see how doing the same thing over a local network could be any more difficult.