Lockpicking lawyer does more than just picking. He shows many ways to break or bypass locks, often very quickly. Given a chance to review this lock, he would likely find three flaws at least. I see the word "steel" is not present in the article, which makes me think one very fast attack would just be a simple hacksaw against the seat tube. Could probably be cut in under sixty seconds if it is aluminum. But a lot of lock cylinders are poor quality and vulnerable to low skill attacks like raking.

> Bike theft is genuinely one of the main issues with cycling as a very real transportation alternative

I have advocated for various police departments to create dedicated bike enforcement units. Patrolling commute heavy areas monitoring for bike theft and enforcing laws against bicyclists.

Correct, but if the lock is trivial to defeat, you can assume people will be carrying screwdrivers / shims and whatever else is necessary to break locks.

If you need to spend 5 minutes carefully setting pins then yeah it's probably going to be safe in public.

I don't know if you just live in a vastly different place than me, but in my 20 years of biking I've only lost 1 bike to theft. I think that's a pretty reasonable cost.