I don't understand your comment, is it like a three seashells joke?
The comment is taking a swipe that the disappointment here is the reporter's lack of grasp of why the remote control is designed the way it is when they complain about it. The downvotes are likely that the comment was made in a relatively low effort/attack-ish way rather than discussing why they think that.
I should've offered more explanation in my, regrettably, "snipe-ish" earlier post. It was wrong not to do so.
I was, and still am, frustrated that someone whose bio indicates a decade of consumer tech review experience doesn't understand modern OEM TV remote design isn't about being GOMS-efficient.
Honestly, "TV" remote GOMS usability probably peaked with the TiVO.
Modern OEM remotes attempt to derive slivers of software revenue from these commodity and retail loss-leading hardware products by explicitly injecting less-efficient workflows into common use cases.
This analysis was done (poorly) at the beginning of the article, but the the writer doesn't connect the obvious dots wrt to removal of the "Input" button.