The smoke can certainly make VFR flying a problem! I flew the DHC Beaver from British Columbia to Ontario three weeks ago in the worst of the smoke in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Though it was technically VMC the whole route (no clouds at all through Alberta and Saskatchewan), 4000 feet above the ground, I could see the ground, but not more than a couple of miles along the ground down sun, and zero along the ground into the sun. Doable VFR, and legal, but not much fun. It cleared up again through Manitoba, with unlimited visibility, but then I hit a wall of the concentrated smoke in northern Ontario, which was impassible. I had to divert and land, and wait for its movement with the passage of the associated front. It was much more dense than I had encountered in Alberta, and it was Alberta smoke (according to the weather office) not from within Ontario!
Two weeks later (last week) in Ontario, we had Quebec smoke, which again took us to the limit of VMC, and smelled unpleasant.
It's an annoyance, but nothing to complain about in the context of hundreds of families whose homes were burned with no opportunity for them to remove their valued possessions - so, I'm not complaining about some smoke.