That's incredibly misleading. The phones were bricked because the screen assembly included the TouchID sensor and the sensors weren't re-keyed. Apple, for security reasons, bricked phones that had TouchID enabled where the sensor didn't match the Secure Enclave. They didn't envision that people would want to replace the displays at the expense of losing TouchID functionality or device security. As soon as it happened, they released an update to simply disable TouchID and warn users that it was now disabled as opposed to disabling the entire phone.