Yeah, unfortunately that particular article is both inaccurate and misleading. For one thing there were two patents involved, for another they only applied to dimmers, and for a third, the new switches they are talking about as now having “instant status” are actually using “central scene command” not the old instant status which was done with the hail Command set. So their availability doesn’t actually have anything to do with the patents one way or the other, but rather with the introduction of the new central scene command sets.
All of which is a lot of technical detail you’re probably not interested in. There’s been a lot of discussion in the forums about all of these issues, but the critical thing is that none of them have anything to do with the Leviton problems. Those are just problems that came in with the new model and they seem to have done something wrong. Which hopefully they will fix eventually.
You can read more about the new kinds of switches in the following thread: