Yeah I've noticed this myself - I'm on the fence as to whether this is actually disabling the account or simply creating that impression (it does show as disabled in Directory Utility after you perform this command).

My hope in recommending people disable this way is that with the additional scrutiny on this subsystem, accounts disabled this way will remain genuinely disabled in a future update. Either way this doesn't seem to reintroduce the bug.

... but the whole thing is a mess overall.