Honestly this sounds like user error. From one of the links in the article:

As the journalist and Apple Store staff tested, if you insert the wrong passcode for 1 to 5 times, there will only be red notifications saying the passcode is wrong, and you needn’t wait to give it another try.

For the 6th time you insert a wrong passcode, it will report, “iPhone is disabled, try again in 1 minute”. And the phone will be locked, and you won’t be able to insert passcode again until 1 minute later.

For the 7th time, the iPhone will show, “iPhone is disabled, try again in 5 minutes”.

For the 8th time, the iPhone will be locked for 15 minutes, and for the 9th time, it will be locked for 60 minutes to insert passcode again.

If you insert the wrong passcode for 10th time, the iPhone will be disabled and you will have to connect it to iTunes to unlock.

Apparently if you jailbreak the iPhone the delays aren’t set correctly (or at least that was the case 10 years ago)?

On top of that, the user couldn’t just wipe the phone because they didn’t want to lose a video that wasn’t backed up anywhere else.