The butterfly keyboard was a _design_ defect, and these are very different things. Apple went to great lengths (because telling Jony Ive 'no' was not an option) to try and tweak the design to function correctly in the real world, and failed.
But they came out of the box functioning perfectly, and stayed that way until tiny specks of dust inevitably entered the picture. The entire saga was extremely boneheaded and after I took mine in for a replacement (which, I must say, was out of warranty and only cost me time) I vowed to never buy another MacBook which had that absurd keyboard. Fortunately I didn't have to, they went back to the proven design which is a true beast and just keeps chugging along for years without a single missed or repeated keystroke.
But this is very different from shipping products with known _manufacturing_ defects, and then 'brushing it under the rug', presumably by not issuing a recall. I can't recall even the former happening with post-iPod era Apple products, let alone the latter.
In this particular case, the most likely culprit is pushing the AirPod into the charging slot with enough force to bend down the contact. There isn't a way to manufacture a spring contact which isn't vulnerable to this, and the fix is easy if you have thin enough tweezers. If Apple shipped an edition of AirPods cases with bad contacts, which didn't charge out of the box, it's a safe bet that there would be press about it. Maybe there was, but if so, I missed the 635 comment HN thread about it.
What? that doesn't sound like Apple at all. They would never do that. I get butterflies just thinking that.