Do keep in mind that 49.99% is still considered "a minority". You know, trying to keep true to math and all that. But if you want to continue to throw around the "small minority" narrative, what would you call an "small" minority? 10%? 5%? 1%?
Apple shipped somewhere around 4M Macs per quarter between 2015 and 2018. If we are extremely conservative, we can safely estimate that at least 25% of those were laptops, which would mean that we're talking about at least 16M laptops that shipped with the butterfly keyboard. Let's say that "only" 1% of those had a defective keyboard. That's still 160,000 defective units that shipped. Definitely a "small minority", but also definitely not insignificant. The real number of butterfly-keyboard computers that actually shipped is probably higher than 16M and the percentage of those that failed is also probably higher than 1%. Based purely on unscientific anecdotes from people in this and other forums who say they bought them in bulk and had a number fail, that number could be as high as 5% - but even at, say 2% you're easily still talking about multiple-hundreds of thousands of defective units shipped.
Really, only Apple knows the true extent of the problem, so the rest of us (you included) can only speculate. What we do know, though, is that Apple themselves acknowledged the problem by taking two pretty significant actions: 1) They created the service programme that is the very subject of this article, and more significantly, 2) They discontinued using the design altogether.
All this is to say that Apple's "affected a small minority" statement is just marketing weasel-word bullhonkey. Repeating said bullhonkey when you are neither an Apple marketing exec nor Apple-paid lawyer is a really bad look.
