Not for me a real issue, havent experienced that over a long time or every day, and it seems several people are still happy with it for whatever usecase. So yes might be, it was an issue for you.
Not as long as you have an invoice, so yes some might die beacuse people brick it while trying the flash and dont have an invoice or some out of the blue and people dont have an invoice, however out of the blue only having EDL mode seems almost 0% to me.
So