I didn’t read the entire article as a significant portion, possibly the majority, of what I did read seemed off topic and/or unnecessarily in-depth/verbose.
The article makes mention of many product and component manufacturers by name then it throws in the phrase “A certain fruit logo”? My initial thought was to question what wrong doing Raspberry PI have been up to lately? followed by thinking may be it’s a reference to Adafruit? After some further brief consideration I concluded it was probably Apple but I’m not 100% sure. Just mention manufacturers by name, special casing one or two manufacturers in an article leads me to think the article is likely to be heavily biased.
For what it’s worth, I also don’t have any issues with cable orientation, I currently have two Evergreen phones here, one shipped in March, the other just a few weeks ago, both function fine with the supplied cable and other cables I have lying around regardless of orientation.
Additionally, the mention of problems getting the phone to power up some times could probably be dealt with by (with the USB cable disconnected) holding the power button for ~20 seconds. My own phone regularly discharges the battery to such an extent that it powers off and won’t power on after recharging with a standard short press of the power button, in almost all cases a long press ~20 seconds will have it powering on.