That's interesting, and I wish the author would've dug into that more. The claim is that people were typing .com when searching for them, but a search would've resulted in a search page, not direct traffic.

As far as direct traffic, they migrated to .com on 1/15/23, at which point supertokens.com already had 1,473 referring domains and 16.6K backlinks. I think it's more likely that the traffic they saw was the result of that instead of people typing the exact domain name (which is relatively rare).

I'd also submit that this is the story as told by their agency, who probably also told them to write this content marketing piece based on that explanation.