Actually, it's not just Huawei, it's pretty much all everything. Pretty much every router, telcom switch, storage system, etc. sold outside the United States comes with a support contract whereby the vendor's engineers can connect and manage the device.

Indeed, there's a recent legal case of a company selling stuff to Iran. The company said they weren't responsible, because it was resold by intermediaries. Yet, their support engineers were connecting in to manage the box.

The lede was really "here's what we saw", at least to the extent that we can reveal anything being bound by customer confidentiality agreements (which, frankly, isn't much, which kinda sucks for the reasder).