Marques didn't trash anything. He gave the thing a fair and honest review. It's just that the pin is not very good. The company making the pin should have done a better job in the first place or they should have kept expectations for their first gen in check and then planned to take in feedback to make a much better second gen device.
I don't understand what responsibility a reviewer has to a company, other than acting and reviewing honestly. It's a VC-funded startup with lots of cash, right? Did Brownlee misrepresent something about their product?
it wasn't a firestorm. It was one tweet so horrible that it went viral for its horribleness, not because any meaningful amount of people thought it was a valid argument.
This. The firestorm was over how horrible the horrible tweet was.