Why do we still have the rubber band with Smart TVs? {letterboxing}

As stated above, many (most?) TVs will let you toggle between “show me the full picture, but letterboxed” and “stretch and fill the screen, zooming in as you must”.

However, a few TVs also have an in-between mode where it tries to compromise between those modes, zooming in and focusing on the center but gradually stretch out the edges to fill the horizontal space – the idea being that the peripheries of the scene are less important and noticeable when stretched, vs the middle of the shot. In practice this looks OK with some shots (landscapes) but still really weird with other ones (like when there’s a crowd shot with many people and faces, and they get fatter near the edges).

For what it’s worth, if you don’t mind sitting up close, they do make “super ultrawide” computer monitors with a 32:9 aspect ratio, like Odyssey OLED G9 49-inch G91SD QHD Curved Gaming Monitor | Samsung US or Monoprice’s version. They primarily target gamers but would work with films too, though at that price you might as well get a theater subscription for several years. They also won’t have good speakers and don’t really replace a proper TV, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a TV in that aspect ratio, which is really too bad, because even many modern films are letterboxed on your traditional 16:9 TVs.