I’d have to use a Roku to disagree with you but, Apple Gen 4 with plex makes me not really care about a “direct connection to media on an external drive.” I play 4-8GB mkv files with no dropped frames from an office computer on the other side of the house.

Indeed you are misremembering. It will get the small updates to improve functionality with apple music and that’s about it, looks like they won’t be adding anything shiny to the old 2/3 gen AppleTV’s... Mostly because that’s the old OS and now the new ones are on tvOS.

Download from the app store again, easy peasy