Truely paranoid people (like me) wouldn't have trusted any third party device in the first place.
Agreed, one shouldn't use a hardware wallet in lieu of long term cold storage, in my opinion.
To equate my habits to easy to understand habits most of us have with our fiat currency:
Hot wallet = Cash in your pocket.
Hardware Wallet = Cash in your "rainy day" savings account.
Cold Storage = IRA/401K or other long term investment account.
I understand what you're saying about how the keys are stored and what Ledger did, but all HW wallets have secure elements, do they not? Those things I don't know much about except that the HW wallet manufacturer (as you stated) should never be able to access the keys stored in said secure element.
Most hardware wallets do indeed have a secure element, except for some of the DIY ones. There might be some exceptions, but I can recall which ones at the moment. Just having a secure element doesn't automatically mean that the seed or keys cannot be extracted. The secure element still needs firmware to operate correctly, so if you install some malicious firmware into your secure element hardware wallet, all your funds could be stolen. And therein lies the rub; we don't know what's in Ledger's firmware.
And a lot of pesky redditors were going on about no HW wallets being completely safe now, precisely because they all contain those secure elements, and they were talking about open-source ones like Trezor, Bitbox, and a bunch of others. I tend to listen to what's said here on bitcointalk, as you all know what the hell you're talking about--but the mood here is gloomy as well.
Be careful when reading anything on any social media site, including this one. Anywhere you go you're likely to run into people talking out of their ass for merit, karma, likes, or just shits and giggles.