That makeuseof article from six years ago has little or no relevance to any new ThinkPad you might buy today.
Lenovo's consumer and business divisions are best thought of as nearly separate companies within one conglomerate.
Lenovo (formerly Legend) sold laptops and desktops for years before they acquired IBM's personal computer business. But they didn't just buy the ThinkPad name, the people came along with it.
The old Lenovo became the consumer group, and the IBM team became the business group. It's very common to find different approaches on hardware and software between the two lines.
As an obvious example, every ThinkPad (with some recent exceptions) has a TrackPoint, but no other Lenovo machine does.
This applies to software too. If you see something bad that happened on Lenovo consumer machines years ago, it's very unlikely that it affected ThinkPads. It just wasn't the same people making these kinds of decisions.
The ThinkPad team's bread and butter is not individuals like you or me, it's corporate customers who buy hundreds or thousands of machines at a time - and have IT staff who scrutinize the hardware and software.
The 2015 makeuseof article made three points. Let me address them in reverse order.
(3) BIOS-Based Malware. The source for that reporting is this Ars Technica article:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenov...
Lenovo followed up quickly with a description of the security issue and provided a removal tool:
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_n...
Near the bottom of the page is a list of the affected models. Note that they were only consumer machines, not ThinkPads.
(2) SuperFish. This was really stupid on Lenovo's part, but again, it was the consumer team who did this. The ThinkPad team would never have allowed something like that, and didn't.
(1) Lenovo Is Spying On You. Some guy bought two refurbished ThinkPads in 2014 and claims they had some Windows spyware. And this is somehow supposed to have anything to do with a Linux ThinkPad you may buy today? Give me a break.
Full disclosure: I am a major ThinkPad fan. I got my first one in 1998, and I have four of them within arm's reach right now: an X1 Extreme and X1 Carbon from work, and my personal P1 and old Yoga 460. Also have a mostly retired W520 and X220 Tablet in the other room, and a few older busted machines. I'm always happy to talk ThinkPads with anyone. :-)