The first screw-up was that they misread the data sheet for the USB hub and Ethernet chip they used and backpowered the entire 3.3V bus from its regulator, causing it to overheat and fall over. Since this caused every method of communicating with the Pi to fail the only solution was to reboot. (Not all boards were affected, it only happened if the voltage of the internal regulator was higher than the external one and every chip had a slightly different voltage.)
The second screw-up was a USB driver bug which caused it to send commands to the USB hub at invalid times if a full-speed or low-speed USB device was connected. Basically every USB keyboard and mouse on the planet is either a full-speed or low-speed device. This caused input issues and even complete hub lockups which were blamed on the keyboards and mice drawing too much power or users connecting an underpowered PSU. In reality, the Pi as originally released was incapable of reliably supporting pretty much any USB input device.
They're slowly getting pulled in kicking [1] and screaming [2]. I just installed the mainline arm64 version of Archlinux onto an Orange Pi Zero Plus, and I was pleasantly surprised that I only had to compile one out-of-tree driver (rtl8189fs for WiFi).
I'd recommend Armbian, a nice distro for ARM SBC's: https://www.armbian.com/
Of course, as with everything in ARM-linux land, GPU drivers are still a WIP. For headless use, it works well though.
The criticism of the article is not about the Pi being hard or something.
Why is nextcloud insecure? Could you provide more information please? (I am about to set up a server for personal use)
Yes, the SD card sucks massive balls, PSU issues are less of a problem now that most people have decent fastcharge USB lying about now.
The support that the PI is worth _every_ tradeoff. It is not a server, You can use it as one, but you have to spend some money, and do some work.
Yes, I'd love a pi with emmc and proper ethernet. But, I don't want to have to support it myself. Virtually all the other pi clones require significant engineering time from me, _or_ are in a black hole of support, stuck on a hacked version of ubuntu 14/16.
For a real datastore, you need a proper atx board with more than one sata port. That means paying > £200(PSU, case, ram, motherboard). I have one of these, and I don't use it for anything other than storing data(no I don't use own/next cloud. I like my stuff reasonably secure.)
The pi is great for what it is. You're trying to make it do something its not designed to do, and its fighting back.