I came here to make the same comment. Glad I didn’t misread it, I couldn’t find that specific statement in the article that would lead me to that conclusion.

It is an interesting read, but there are clearly numerous factors at play.

Factory reset isn’t the end of the world, I did it to my gen2 Chromecast when the outage first happened and managed to get it connected again by rolling my phone’s date back and finishing the setup.

This article was super helpful and helped temporarily restore casting functionality from my phone. https://mensfeld.pl/2025/03/bringing-your-chromecast-back/