"choose models with special versions of protected microcontrollers"

I don't see how this is helpful advice.

The whole point of the article was how the look and feel of a legitimate hardware wallet was cloned.

Under these circumstances there is no way to tell what is in the device(clear housing perhaps?). all it has to do is act like the real device. It does not matter how good your security chip actually is if all I have to do is copy the correct interface.

Unrelated: the use of that particular version is a strangely shoddy mistake. It should have been very easy to use a version string that exists. In which case that version would never have been skipped??? perhaps at one point that was a real version and trezor pulled it due to it's use in a batch of clone units.