I’m sure it all feels really crazy, but fortunately there is quite a bit of information available. There were official announcements on this for the last several months, I suspect the Stacy on IOT article that you saw is from March 1 and referred to the V1, not the V2. The V2 has not been sold for about a year, but they haven’t given a retirement date yet.
Anyway, the short answer is that, yes, several of the older versions of the hubs were retired. And separately, Samsung has decided they no longer want to be in the business of selling and supporting Smartthings branded IOT hardware. So they are entering into partnerships with other companies to offer “works as a smartthings hub“ devices and the other sensors. They will continue to offer the app and the cloud services.
The partner for North America and Europe is Aeotec. Their first offering is a clone of the smartthings V3 hub and can be purchased from multiple retailers, including Amazon and the smartest house.
You put these two things together, and Samsung decided to give owners of the retiring hub models, including the V1, whose devices were still under warranty a discount code that would be good at the smartest house for a discount on the new aeotec offering.
As I mentioned, there has been much discussion of all of this in the forum, I’m surprised you didn’t find any of those threads. Some are in the official “announcement“ section of the forum and some are in the Devices section.
Here’s The official thread on the new Aeotec partnership:
An Update Regarding our Hardware
And here’s the community thread on the retirements:
Hub retirements (2021) V1, Nvidia Link, ADT
There are a number of possible alternatives if you want to go to something else. You can find discussion of those in the following section of the forum:
And here is the official Aeotec page on the replacement devices they will be offering. Some are available now, the rest are expected in the next few months.
So start with those topics, and you should find plenty of existing conversations that address this issue.