Ya this goes way back before WD actually said they had smr drives in production. After about a few months of blogs attacking them, they released the link your referring too. I am only going by what others are saying. And what i have on hands knowledge about. I own a 10tb smr drive. Its a white label shuck.
I took out the old 2 TB drives from my MyCloudEX2 Ultra NAS and am now using them with a top loading “toaster” external 2.5/3.5" 2 bay drive reader so that I can store backups of my bluray movie rips after I upload the originals to my Plex server on the new 10 TB drives now in the NAS. I still havent found a 2+ bay drive enclosure to setup a DAS (Direct Access Storage) yet…but hope to some day. for now the “toaster” works fine
I reformatted the drives before I started using them for this use case
