...Right, and the opposite of all of the positive ways to deal with it, would be bricking the device you sold to a customer, as in this case. We're not even talking about a bad review, just a forum post. While I grant your point about commodities, you can't be further from such a thing than an IoT garage door remote.
Basically, this is a business in which you need to desperately convince the customer to want an ongoing relationship with you, for a service they could get with a $5 remote, 9volt included.
I'm in no way defending this particular company here; I was responding to the issue of "customer is always right" wrt. B2C business.
The company here behaved wrong and they deserve whatever loss of business comes out of this mess, regardless of how rude the customer was. They handled it badly. That said, I have no particular love for IoT companies - I find the idea of those cloud-connected devices to be dumb from both user and engineering point of view. To be clear - I'm not opposed to smart devices per se - just those which require vendor's cloud, which makes them basically hardware-as-a-service, and which works against privacy and interoperability.
Basically, this is a business in which you need to desperately convince the customer to want an ongoing relationship with you, for a service they could get with a $5 remote, 9volt included.