I mean, it obviously did make it to the public because that WP article was written in 2019, and I remember hearing some of those details (that it wasn't so much "the code has backdoors" as "the code is so shit, it doesn't even matter if there's a backdoor in there deliberately") back then.

By the time any highly-technical topic makes it to the mainstream discourse, the details tend to get stripped out simply because none of the 70 year olds watching CNN or Fox appreciate the difference and none of the anchors or panelists know what they're talking about either.