The author acknowledges exactly these quality issues, and makes this his recommendation if you prioritize the anti-theft features over things like price and reliability.

He does make it sound like they are very willing to replace problematic bikes, which might not be the experience of those in your Facebook groups:

> these have a higher percentage of bikes with an issue than they’d like. In my experience, that meant sending the bike back and getting a replacement. So I wouldn’t want this to be my only bike