I hard disagree with one of your positions; I think 0 F is cold but 100 F is insane. I assume we grew up in different climates. I say this only to make the point that it’s subjective, but 0-100 is still the range of what people generally find tolerable.

Tell me you don’t understand how electrical transformers work without telling me you don’t know understand electrical transformers work.

For the 40mm impact munitions in the list. Riot control gear.

“Grenade launcher” here isn’t very specific. Could be like an M203 or something, which is a tube launcher that lobs 40mm rounds up to about 100m. You can absolutely get 40mm frag grenades and blow shit up, that’s what most people think of when they think of a “grenade launcher,” but that’s not what it’s on the list here. You can lob gas canisters, smoke, illumination flares, etc etc etc, just depends on what you’re trying to do.

You’re not wrong about reolinks, amcrest, hikvision, etc but their price:quality can’t be beat and they work well with many different NVR software suites, which makes them popular.

If you’re concerned about how they call home (they do, I’ve sniffed packets on my network to test the rumors and seen it on every one of them), you need to isolate the cameras off of the internet so they are blocked from the outside connection. This can end up being mildly tricky to very complicated depending on your network equipment, the way your LAN is set up at home, whether you want to view your cameras remotely, etc, but it’s the most cost effective long term option that is not subscription/cloud based.

I use blue iris on an old computer. It works great. I have unifi network gear, and I tried some of their cameras out but they’re not really ONVIF compliant and they’re extremely expensive for an equivalent Chinese brand. That’s the made in USA price, and tbh Unifi cameras aren’t even that expensive, they’re more “prosumer” for small business deployments or nerds at home. They have a walled garden ecosystem that I dipped my toe into and didn’t care for some of it, but I still use their access points, routers, and switches because they’re great quality and really easy to config.

But, if you have never done any of that, you might just want to go with an off the shelf solution or be willing to spend a lot of time reading. You DON’T want to mess up your network security trying to install local cameras if you’re not sure what you’re doing.

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is an RF/analogue camera kit. It’s not as easy to set up as POE (two cords to each camera and they’re way bigger so running them through walls will do more damage that you have to patch later) you can get an all-in-one NVR+4/8/12/16 etc camera kit with as many bells and whistles as you want. It will be cheaper as well and you don’t have to worry about network bandwidth issues because it’s analog. The feeds are super nice.