There were even stories of those crazy coupon people reselling on Amazon, and some cases of returned retail products ending up as “new” on Amazon. Which gets problematic with certain things like consumables (the WSJ did an article on toothpastes iirc).
Does this actually make a difference? I remember the issue was that Amazon would bin devices together regardless if they're from some random third-party or direct sale, so you could have fakes mixed in with genuine and it was basically a lucky dip.
Is this not still the case?
Ultimately, I'd be weary of buying things like this from Amazon and as you suggest go to a more traditional retail channel instead.
AMEN to that !
And the most annoying thing is that those of us who know to avoid FBA is that Amazon have removed the "sold by Amazon" search filter tick-box.
So whilst in the past you could tick a box and be presented with a list of products which are direct-sold rather than FBA, you cannot do that anymore.
According to some Reddit posts, you can still do it if you hack the URL and add an "emi=$obscure_value" GET-param. But I'm guessing sooner or later Amazon will kill this work-around too.