As always, these articles seem to be written from a US or "international" point of view that doesn't seem to understand that country TLDs are actually, at least initially, intended for the people of that country.

They are great, absolutely useful, and much lower risk than gTLDs operated by questionable commercial entities. But obviously they depend on the country they represent.

I would argue that the main problem is that they should never have been available to entities that don't have ties to the country. That would have solved most of these problems that seem to boil down to "when you pick a random country TLD because it looks cute but you don't know much about the country, sometimes you're surprised by that country's policies".