And I just saw the price. Holy.
It's easy to make (or buy) a shitty wheel, but if you commute on a bike, you need to invest in well built wheels
That sounds like you were ripped off. It isn't hard to do and it isn't hard to do right. It takes very little in terms of investment in tools (the most important thing is a stable stand so you can rotate the wheel, an old fork with a guide attached will do fine for this, and a $15 hardened spoke key).
According to fairly widespread bike folklore (i.e., in the absence of real stats), machine built wheels tend to start out with insufficient tension. Correcting that one issue will result in a more stable and longer lasting wheel. I've seen this on two bikes in my family's fleet, both were new from bike shops, and of reputable brands. Our oldest bikes, with hand made wheels, have stayed put for decades.
1) Stress relieving is tensioning the spokes by grabbing pairs and squeezing them. This takes a elastic bending moment in the j-bend and over-stresses it into plastic deformation, permanently changing the shape of the spoke. When relaxed from the stress relieving, the spoke is bent differently, and the stress in the spoke is more uniform with less of a bending moment. (bending moments lead to a compressive stress on one side and tension on the other, superimposed over the tension of the spoke. If the compressive side of the spoke winds up with an actual stress reversal on every wheel revolution, it will start to crack and fail in O(1e6) cycles, or 2000km). Due to the overstress here, this also beds the spoke into the hub.
2) Windup comes from the spoke being a long torsional spring. There's friction between the spoke threads and the nipple, and if the threads aren't lubricated, the friction is enough to twist the spoke instead of tightening the thread. You'll still see some of this with thinner spokes and higher tension, but you can back off a bit on each adjustment and make sure that the spoke isn't twisted before going on. This windup causes the pinging when a new wheel is used for the first time, and each spoke is somewhat unloaded when it's at the bottom of the rotation. This reduces the friction in the threads, and the spoke springs back, changing it's total length.
Incidentally, the highest compression in the rim and highest tension ever in the spokes is in the stress relieving step of wheel building. This is where a super tensioned wheel will potato chip buckle if it's going to. Adding a tire and air pressure reduces the spoke tension. When riding, the bottom ~4ish spokes detension somewhat (depends on the spoke count, numbers are for old school 32ish/ 700c not terribly deep rims).
I believe this is one of the important steps in making a wheel stay true and not need trueing after one ride. This is described better in the Art of Wheelbuilding if you want to try it.
The tire and air pressure thing is perfectly logical and anybody can demonstrate this, as you pump up the tire the spoke pitch goes down.
Elastic deformation is not a time dependent property, and should be the regime in which the wheel is operating.
Plastic deformation is (also not time dependent) where you have gone beyond the yield point of the material, and have permanently changed the shape, even after unloading the part. All of the plastic deformation of wheel components should happen at build time.
Creep is when a constant load causes additional time dependent strain. There shouldn't be anything in a wheel that creeps, but it's possible that some plastics or epoxy/composites could creep.
I suspect this is true, except that parts being what they are (always with small inconsistencies) and the spoke nipples riding inside the rim and j bends in the spokes riding inside the holes in the hub tend to 'find their spot' after being exercised for a while. I've made it a pretty hard rule to re-check after 6 weeks and invariably something has shifted. This probably indicates that my wheel building technique could be better, then again, I've never had a wheel that I built fail - so far - and over the years have done between 100 and 200, some of them for very heavily loaded bikes (tandem trekking bikes).
Most recent wheel was actually this weekend, I'll be sure to give it another really good look to see if I missed something that might cause this which I can catch at an earlier stage.
My typical wheels: double walled aluminum rims, quality spokes and nipples (and the latter seem to be hit-and-miss, I've had bad batches of nipples more than once in spite of re-ordering the exact same kind, but I noticed it immediately during assembly), typically Shimano hubs.
Usually I put the wheel back on the stand after a week or two of riding. A really good builder shouldn't need to do this, but part of this whole exercise is to evaluate and improve my skills as I build more wheels. And I'm not building racing wheels, but trying to do the best possible job is part of the learning process.
I recently re-spoked my s-pedelec because I didn't like the spoke brand and nipples used, that thing is too heavy and too fast to take any chances with.