Not really, "better" hardware is subjective in a laptop. For all the complaining people do, Apple is very good about ensuring that the hardware in their machines works as expected and hits a solid baseline performance level for given tasks.
The butterfly keyboard had design flaws. This is a well known and well documented fact. There is literally an Apple keyboard repair program for the butterfly keyboard, and this new MacBook pro uses a different keyboard design altogether.
When something rises to the level of a recall, especially for Apple (who denied that logic board issues were an issue on two separate models of MBP for me for months before issuing recalls), it rises a bit beyond "anecdote".
