If you read the posts from 737 pilots on this forum, yes, runaway stabilizer procedures have been pretty standard for decades. As mduell noted in this thread and another, ET has crashed 10% of their 737 fleet in the last decade.

As far as complaints go, why do people complain about everything? If you use Yelp, you'll find about 10-12% of reviews will complain about even the best restaurants or hotels. Anything with a Rotten Tomatoes score above 80% is probably doing well. BTW, from what I gathered reading that article, there were a total of 2 specific complaints of an actual incident (and it sounded from other posts like they may have been capt and FO noting problems with the same flight) while the other "complaints" were more general, about the inadequacy of training or the flight manual (and in fact, those cited by the article came from the same pilot).

Again, I am far less concerned about this than I was a week or two ago after reading the responses from professional 737 pilots.