Apple didn't inform users that battery replacements would make their sluggish phones fast again.
It's been established (and admitted to by Apple themselves) that the throttling was not properly explained to consumers.
False. The retail and support staff were not informed of the throttling. See my other comment.
It's possible that some staff deduced that replacing the battery would help, based on personal observations, but they were never advised by corporate to do this as policy. As such, the vast majority of them were not recommending battery replacements.
You must have got lucky.
They have an article about hardware microphone disconnects, prolonging battery life, etc. yet they neglected to write an article about hardware throttling.
It's almost as if they had a hardware problem and instead of issuing a recall, they quietly pushed a software fix. No, that can't be it.