This is partially true. The use celery extract or whatever they can get away with legally. Smoking is what gives bacon the flavor. Buy your cut of meat, season, and smoke it with a very low temp for long time, you have bacon. No nitrates.
No you won't. You'll have smoked pork. Nitrite curing is the difference between ham and pork, and is part of the source of American bacon's flavor. You can make or buy unsmoked bacon; it will still taste like bacon.
It is weird to me that people try to make an issue out of this, because it's not like the flavor change in cured meat is hard to miss. Just buy some pink salt! Corned beef tastes like corn beef because of nitrites.
If there is a thing a reasonable person can do with pork belly, I have done it. I think you have the higher evidentiary burden here, regardless of our respective experience. You can check Ruhlman's Charcuterie and Salumi books, you can check AskCulinary, you can check the food Stack Exchange, you can just notice that literally every packaged bacon product, whether or not it claims to be cured, is in fact cured (usually with celery powder), or, of course, you can just take some sliced pork belly and make a 5% pink salt/salt mix and throw it in a zip in your fridge overnight and see.
I get that you like smoked pork belly. I do too. I don't even object to you calling it "bacon". All sorts of things that aren't American bacon are called bacon. But nitrites are absolutely part of the distinctive flavor of American bacon.
The whole thing is silly, because we can just point to ham and corned beef, two products where the debate doesn't even make sense; we only see it with bacon, and we only see it because vendors lie about whether their products are cured.
