I don't understand? This saves money as the consumer doesn't have to buy hubs for every set of lightbulbs or whatever. It just relies on the Apple TV or HomePod.
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Review: Aqara's Roller Shade Driver E1, TVOC Air Quality Monitor, and Hub M1S Are Reliable and Well-Designed HomeKit Accessories
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They're probably talking about how a lot of the companies making HomeKit-compatible products charge a premium, whereas Aqara's products tend to be very reasonably priced. So you may not need to buy their hub, but you may end up paying a lot more overall once you start buying several devices.
I'd love to have fewer hubs, but if the day-to-day usage is less reliable *today* compared to using another manufacturer's products that happen to use a hub, then I'll take the hub, thanks. For example, the Lutron Caseta products (e.g., light switches & dimmers) are known to be extremely reliable, responsive, and offer good range. Whereas, the devices that work via Apple's Apple TV or HomePod mini have typically used Bluetooth, which has poor range, often resulting in an unreliable end-user experience.
Thread and Matter are there to resolve issues with connectivity and unreliability. It's one of the main focuses of the new standard. Thread acts a lot like Zigbee and can create ad-hoc networks, Matter acts as the standard that different devices are able to talk to one another over. Also Matter will communicate over Thread, Bluetooth, and WiFi so it should offer a lot more resiliency.
I'm actually thinking of replacing my perfectly good Apple TV 4K with the newly released version just for the Thread support.
I ordered the shade driver off Amazon UK on Wednesday - it's turned up today but I've not installed it yet. When I looked at Amazon again yesterday it showed as "We don't know when and if we'll be getting this item back in stock again" - and today it seems to have completely vanished; the link in this article just lands on an Amazon search results page.