It is simple for any person with even basic knowledge of networking to independently come to the conclusion that Roombas are not uploading video streams (or photographs) to the internet.
I know the IP (10.0.0.11) and MAC (50:14:79:1E:AB:6B) address of my Roomba and using the Insight Netflow Analyzer for OPNsense I can see how much data it has sent to the internet. In the last six months it has sent approximately 72MB of data outside my network. That's about 600KB per day.
It has received much more, presumably firmware downloads.
This is consistent with firmware update checks, notification traffic, and me periodically adjusting its schedule remotely.
That's just me clicking on some tabs in my router's web UI. Hundreds if not thousands of people globally are constantly reviewing and monitoring Roomba network traffic in fine detail in order to understand and/or reverse engineer it for research and other purposes.
So one of three things is happening:
1. All Roombas send photo and video streams to iRobot and they have thus far managed to hide this from the public and the thousands of eyeballs constantly monitoring the network traffic of their products, or
2. A subset of Roombas send photo and video streams to iRobot and they have thus far managed to hide this from the public and the subset of eyeballs monitoring the network traffic of their products
3. These are development devices like they claim.
Based on my own experience we can eliminate 1, based on the images accompanying the article option 3 is highly likely.