I can feel my blood boiling for you. In fact I'm in the market for a new phone and stories like this make me actively want to avoid Samsung. As companies get larger and larger they will tend to make choices that are suboptimal to consumers.

Cynical me says that Samsung is seeing above average warranty claims on these foldable phones. Thus they need to get them down so some manager somewhere decides that they will enforce the policies more strictly with small scratches and dents outright disqualifying claims. Lo and behold this reduces the warranty claims paid out but in the grand scheme of things completely demolishes any customer loyalty.

I wonder if author reached out via twitter or some other social media channel to have Samsung comment.

Also I have to think what Apple or Google would do. I'm pretty sure Apple would just straight up repair the phone with very few questions (that has been my experience). Google you'd have to go through a longer warranty process but my guess is they'd be more lenient and eventually you'd get a new or repaired phone.

Samsung is losing hard here.