After suffering through the APC and TrippLite crap, I bought a Falcon SSG1.5K UPS a few years ago for my animation workstation and network stuff. It has been fantastic. It does have a fan but it isn't noticeably loud.
$50 consumer-grade products are almost always "crap," but you're making a sweeping generalization across dozens of product lines in 2 brands without offering any evidence or proof that you used appropriate products for the task. Fans on most UPSes only kick-in when their inverters run during an outage or a test for cooling.
I happen to have an SMX1500RM2UNC with humidity and dual temperature logging. It's floor or rack mountable, uses commodity batteries in a repairable pack, expandable, remotely manageable, logs details, works like a champ with under-voltage and other edge-case transfer conditions.
A writer is extremely unlikely to be an expert on backup power supplies anymore that I am an expert on coronary cannulas. Appeal to authority or an anecdotal testimonial is flimsy support, at best.
Sorry for your loss, but you might be wandering into the weeds on this one.
Even if either one or both were also a principle engineer for Intel, that'd still be a spurious, appeal-to-authority because they weren't a modern enterprise sysadmin, IT manager, or equivalent with visibility into what works and what doesn't in the real-world at scale.
Lionization in one or two domains for a limited time doesn't breed domain expertise across other areas for longer times. For anyone to be called, or call themselves, a polymath within the past 100 years is absolutely absurd. There are too many bifurcating domains splitting and branching too quickly for anyone of integrity to claim to "master" and stay in mastery of them.
I don't really care who they are: if they don't have sufficiently-current experience with enterprise-class gear, then random people have absolutely no place making claims about UPSes with supposed endorsements from dead dudes.
What claims have been made? I have owned, and dealt with, dozens of UPSs in both personal and commercial settings (animation studios, mostly) and Pournelle's article led me to research, and eventually buy, a Falcon. I have been much happier with it than any other.
I have 3 smx3000rmhv2unc's and 2 of them give an error "battery bus soft start fault", according to the expert:
"I suspect that the metering of the capacitor voltage is slightly wrong on this model of UPS. We've seen this error a few times and the units have performed fine both before and after. Its to do with checking the voltage rise on the cap on power on / battery supply. I think it meters out of tolerance and throws the fault when perhaps either the centerpoint is skewed or the tolerance is too fine."
https://westwardsales.com/falcon-ssg1.5k-ups
I bought it because the late writer Jerry Pournelle told me to.
https://www.falconups.com/byte6417-final.pdf
https://www.falconups.com/2008Chaos%20Manor%20Award.pdf