I've had a Chromecast for almost a decade, and it had mostly been great. They cost £30 at the time, and let you cast from most media apps, even if they didn't really have their own UI. You could take it to a friends house / hotel, power it off of the USB port on the back of most TVs and you'd be off to the races.

Given that they are now discontinued and my old one doesn't support 4K and casting from some newer apps (maybe a lack of AV1 / h265 support?), I'm looking for a replacement.

I'm looking for a privacy-respecting device in a vaguely stick-like format that will support casting from Android. It having support for apps is a nice to have for me.

Before you say "well if you use YouTube / Plex it's not private because they collect data about what you watch", sure, that may be true, but I'd rather not have the stick itself also do ACR on everything I cast as well.