Most wall thermostats are designed to read the temperature of the air; the wall behind may be warmer or colder.
This is correct. Specifically for the honeywells, they have little holes to measure air temperature usually on the top or bottom depending on model. The smart ones (like this one is) can also be manually calibrated up or down from what their internal thermostat says if there’s a known deviation (i.e. the wall is consistently putting off enough heat to throw off the stat).
I can sort of see the justification: the nazi hate machine is powered by twitter, youtube, et al having 230 as a shield to hide behind, and once they start being liable all that hate and outrage bait is likely to evaporate very quickly. It’s an ass-backwards way of getting there, but I can see a train of thought where it made some kind of sense.