Your tin-foil hat is on way too tight.
Count me in as one of the doubters that Matter will ever actualize its prophecy as the savior of smarthome disparateness, but believing there is some kind of ill-intentioned cabal behind the curtain pulling all the strings is not why.
One of ! Everyone who is anyone is part of the alliance,
Google, Apple, Amazon, Legrand, LG, lutron! Just a few.
That fact that you think it's a "Google product" means you have no idea about it and are just spreading false truths based on miss information.
Matter application layer has the "potential" it make some serious waves through the industry not just home automation but commercial building management systems. It's early days but the fact that the industry I work in is talking about it and moving on it is a very big thing.
Matter is emerging in retail markets but there’s a way to go both in acceptance, specification and capability/stability. For those wanting a dependable ‘as advertised’ integration I think we’re still 9 months off. But I believe it’s a viable and welcome future
I certainly agree that we are months away from Matter being really widely available, and therefore in my own humble personal opinion, there is no need for Hubitat to rush into this at this point in time.
Since we are on the topic, the number one ting that I am looking to Matter for is the issue of onboarding. That is, the objective should be one consistent method of getting any device onto the Hub. (And one method of removing any device.) If they accomplish just that one goal, then it will be worth it, in my humble opinion.
But for the continuing need for more than just Matter devices going forward. So you'll have just another onboarding thing to learn and do... It seems very unlikely for Matter to become the only type of devices a user will want to onboard to the hub.
There's altogether way too much Matter KoolAid being consumed.
If not years, if ever...
I view Matter, Thread and Z-Wave LR as all being in a similar situation. All nascent solutions, needing that one big push to make them truly relevant. Of the three, I think Matter has the best chance of ending up with some kind of relevance.
At the lower level, thread has minimal traction, and Z-Wave LR appears to have essentially none. Disappointing, but it is what it is.
There is one thing that worries me about Matter...
I have no doubt Matter will gain some traction -- there is a potentially huge market out there of customers who have relatively simple/easy smarthome wants, and Matter would indeed be a rising tide that lifts all manufacturer's boats in terms of reaching that portion of the market.
But I think it'll go like this with most (if not all) product manufacturers - "You get features A - K with Matter (which may be enough in most cases for the aforementioned market), but if you want features L - Z, then you gotta use our own whiz-bang app/hub"
And I then worry that if they feel like they've yielded enough with that level of Matter support, then they may shut down their APIs -- and that would really hurt, especially if they hold fast to locking numerous features behind their own app or hub.
But I suppose we'll see!
This is a timely article from the Verge:
Another Matter article
I have been saying that since the beginning. Matter isn't magically going to connect all your devices together and allow you to bring device "A" into ecosystem "B" without limitations.
Right on -- and doing that likely won't really bother me (and folks like us who have established robust local setups), so I've always been "meh" on Matter.
But then I got to thinking... If those nudges back into their own walled gardens are successful enough, then I worry they'll take the next step of either disabling APIs (feeling those are no longer practical to support), or dropping production/support of zigbee / z-wave products, and that would be no bueno... Hopefully the pendulum doesn't swing that far!
And we'll see if that pendulum ever even starts to swing at all... Currently, it seems the walled-garden bickering is already sinking this whole ship before it's even getting out to sea. I don't hate that lol.
This is why I raised the question above about what is in it for various parties. What really does a device manufacturer get out of a standard that would effectively turn their product into a commodity? Who benefits from that? Amazon, Apple and Google certainly don't care if that is the result, they benefit. So sure, a device manufacturer wants something that makes consumers stick with them, just like Apple uses their ecosystem to lock consumers in to their products. Feature differentiation is not going away just because there is a Matter spec, anymore than it went away with Z-Wave or Zigbee products.
Does Matter even matter? I sure don't know!
I'll chime in here with a real world example that is happening in my house. I'm running the Matter beta on our Philips Hue Bridge and it is working wonderfully for our purposes. My journey started with Hue and Google Homes before a desire to do more hit and I ended up using Hubitat to backend (basically, the Automation versus Control debate). Where the Matter beta has helped is provide local control of our hue bulbs via the Google Home app (voice is obviously still cloud) since this is what my family knew before we added Hubitat. Using CoCoHue and its Eventstream, whenever my wife or kids changes something via Google, it automatically updates Hubitat. I automate our circadian rhythm and Hue scenes via Hubitat, but the family can always do the basics (on/off, brightness, colors) via Google. If they want scenes, I'll program buttons via Hubitat to control since scenes are not part of Matter standard or they can use the Hue app. This setup works really well as my family has not needed to learn a new app nor have I needed to create dashboards.
The current major issue is who owns the thread network. Apple, Google, Amazon, HA etc. create thir own thread network that can't be easily merged with others, if they utilse one The idea was that a (single) thread network could be shared and utilised by everyone, not just for visualisation but the transport layer. Unlike Z-Wave or Zigbee.
Yes you can expose devices from one thread owner e.g. Apple to another but that's not using thread throughout. I would want one network with all it's resilience and design for my home... all my thread devices .
In this regard, Matter is likely to be better than many standards such as Zigbee and Zwave where you have to implement device-specific drivers to access manufacturer specific features. That requires a hub maker to implement hundreds of unique drivers, many of them only partially implemented (think Z-wave parameters which are often not fully implemented by the core Hubitat drivers).
Where Matter does batter is through its standardization of a new "Mode Select" cluster. This is a new type of control that allows the device to define and label its manufacturer-specific features in a standard way. See below for an example from the Matter spec. In the example below, the "Mode Select" feature allows a coffee maker device to define two labeled controls "Milk" and "Sugar"; as further explained in the standards document, each of these Mode Select controls would then have a further list of subitems that can be chosen (e.g., "skim", "1% fat", "whole").
A matter controller would need to simply implement the device-independent code to read the cluster labels and items, and then present the items in a selectable list. The controller wouldn't need to know what type of device it is, just that it needs to present a label and a list of choices. The controllers (i.e., Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, Home Assistant, etc.), would each need to implement this as common / generic code that can then be used across a range of devices from a range of Manufactures to implement manufacturer specific features in a device independent manner.
So, there might be some features that this couldn't handle, but I'd say it will cover a huge number of manufacture-specific options.
The issue now is getting manufacturers to write their code to take advantage of this. As an example, I recently purchased some Nanoleaf bulbs. Nanoleaf could have used the Mode Select to provide a standard way of selecting lighting effects, but they didn't, and you do have to use their app. That's not a Matter problem though - that's Nanoleaf choosing to do it without using the features of the standard that could have provided a better user experience.
=========== Illustrative Example ==============
I was actually surprised to see an ad on YT (when browsing not signed in) from Leviton, talking about their smart lighting; the ad began with the Matter logo on screen.
At the current time, I think Leviton are doing Matter in conjunction with Wifi only.
Home: On dropped a new podcast this weekend and they had the Apple Homekit guru on, and they were talking about Matter at the 27:50 mark in their podcast. Lots of "oversold" and "capabilities" and "problems"
So its another Z-Wave (so far).
As for real experience with Matter/Thread, I have 24 Matter devices (a dozen outlets, 8 RGB bulbs, 4 wall switches / dimmers) on a mix of Thread and WiFi. Its pretty clear to me that the software isn't quite there yet. They definitely need a development SDK update (not surprising for a relatively new technology). Since the last github Releases of OpenThread and Matter, there have been many hundreds of changes to the code which shows a great deal of effort to polish and fix, but now they need to do a SDK release incorporating all of these to get the devices performing better.
On a comparative note, I used to be a big Z-Wave fan (over 100 devices), but after years of using Z-wave, there are still ghost-node problems, unexplainable network delays etc. and Silicon Labs doesn't seem to be improving it much at all (the last major change - ZWave Long Range - was announced in 2020 and still barely a whisper on full hub and device support). Given the momentum behind Matter, and the fact that its really the only path forward that Apple, Google, and Amazon have, my personal view is that the weight of these major companies backing the standard, and the reputational risk they have, will force Matter to progress and have its problems solved long before Z-Wave is ever fixed.
Then we have Zigbee. For those of us with C-8 hubs and battery operated devices, Zigbee has also been a huge problem as of late with devices dropping off the network for no explainable reason. I've given up on battery operated Zigbee for now (removing all my sensors from my C-8); But at least plug-in devices seem solid.
In short, of the established technologies Zigbee and Z-Wave, and the newcomer Matter / Thread, none of these really get far beyond the "enthusiastic hobbyist" level - all of these technologies have significant reliability issues. Many of us have just gotten used to dealing with the giant amount of "suck" that is ZWave and Zigbee, so its easier to criticize the newcomer without remembering the day-to-day suckage of the current technologies.
I sense a feeling of big frustration in your post. The frustration that many of us hobbyists have come to experience over the years. The reality is that for most users, the smart home journey is not filled with stories of gloom and doom.
Each protocol has its own advantages and can help users achieve a rewarding smart home experience. Let us not forget that smart home means convenience, first, and that comes from simplicity. Too often we the hobbyists are responsible for our self-induced pain, by pushing our systems beyond their limits, and trying to do more than what it is reasonable, while having a budget that is stretched way too thin.
Sure the market is filled with inexpensive gadgets that claim to be following one protocol or another, but that doesn't mean all devices are created equal, nor does it mean the protocol is flawed. Sticking to reputable manufacturers and planning a smart home system before jumping in, can go a long way to achieve the reliability that we all so much desire.
Like you said, the prospect of Matter becoming the new "Zee" wave protocol like Zee-igbee and Zee-Wave is bright. But like its "Zee" predecessors will not be crowned as the almighty King despite the current push. It might open up the interoperability of certain devices that were not playing nice together with other devices, before. But Matter and its Wi-Fi, Thread and maybe Bluetooth protocols will join Z-Wave and Zigbee as another option to "mesh" together an awesome smart home system. 
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