They do accept traditional keys but the whole point of the lock is to delegate restricted access to people at certain times and with logs/notifications. So a physical key is like an admin override, not to be used in normal circumstances. As such, only me and my partner have them, and we generally never use them. In a wonderful example of Murphy's Law we were both out of town this weekend so all the people that were supposed to be coming to the venue to set up for a show were locked out with no recourse, it was a huge mess. Long story short, the use case of these locks renders the traditional key fallback less than ideal.

Having to pay to send a locksmith to every lock they bricked.

I wonder if a certification body (like UL) could work though. Probably is it is hard to boil "works good" down to a set of clear requirements.

I expect this to continue getting worse. At some point, hopefully, things will change and begin to improve. I think we'll see many more -- and worse -- incidents like this before that happens, though.