I own a 15" MacBook Pro 2016 and already this keyboard has given me more trouble than any other laptop keyboard. Several of the keys are "mushy" and harder to press than most of the others, and there have been times where a spec of dust rendered some of the keys temporarily defective. None of the keys have outright stopped working, and I thankfully haven't run into the double-keypress issue, so at the moment the mushy keys are not worth risking getting an even worse keyboard if I were to try to get a replacement before my warranty expires (I purchased this less than a year ago Apple refurbished).
This petition may not amount to anything, but I'm sure someone in Cupertino has taken notice. Apple has "we know what's best for our customers, better than they do" engrained in their culture, and when it comes to design decisions, sometimes they are right, but I don't see how anyone there could justify a defective or unreliable (at best) keyboard being the right thing for any of its customers. You know what would take courage? To publicly acknowledge the issue and do right by your customers. That takes way more courage than removing a headphone jack.
Unless a recall actually happens (not likely, but I'm really hoping so), we'll never know what--if any--kind of impact this petition has had, but I'm hoping it will cause Apple to (at minimum) go back to the drawing board on this thing and give us a better keyboard the next time around. They should also expose the keyboard to more rigorous testing (that includes dust and other air debris). I just hope the keyboard I have lasts until I'm ready for an upgrade because I don't see myself spending $700 on a repair when this is already the most expensive laptop I've ever purchased (and the $700 is a gamble considering you could get an even worse keyboard).
The sad thing is, back in 2006 I was in the US Military stationed in Baghdad, and I had with me a cheap $600 Dell laptop. That thing survived sand storms that would leave the inside of our tent (and all of our belongings) covered in dust (even with the laptop lid closed and inside of a locker). I highly doubt this keyboard would have survived that deployment. It's sad that a low-end DELL computer from 2006 had a keyboard that's more reliable than Apple's top of the line notebook. If it weren't for macOS, which I love probably more than Apple does, this whole keyboard saga would have caused me to ditched Apple laptops and go with Lenovo.
At the time of this writing, 16,778 people have signed the petition. If each one of those people are a MBP owner, and let's round down the average cost to $2000, that's $33,556,000. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the 5.8 billion in Mac revenue in Q2; however, the Mac business seems big enough to at least please the thousands of customers who feel cheated.