If the recall is SO urgent that they have to nerf your phone to get your dumb *** to turn it in...it's obviously worse than you think.
Honestly part of me wonders if this entire thing is just fearmongering forced by for-profit media.
This isn't a problem unique to Samsung. It is exceedingly rare, but all phones can "explode"/catch fire for various reasons. That is why packages containing electronics with lithium-ion batteries all have warnings on them.
It's not just phones, but many electrical components in general. PSU's, for example. The more wattage you try and demand from a desktop's PSU, the more likely it is to fail. This is specifically why I avoided opting for a ridiculously huge power supply unit when building my current desktop.
I feel like this could largely be the case here as well. Samsung even switched battery manufacturers and still had issues reported with the second recall, so it is unlikely that there is a flaw in the batteries themselves.
My theory is we could be pushing the boundaries of what lithium-ion batteries are capable of. Flagship phones are trying to cram more and more storage capacity into smaller and smaller form factors with increasingly rapid charging rates.
In this case, the Galaxy Note may indeed present more of a danger than previous flagship phones. However, this is going to become an issue that is discovered with more and more flagship phones, not just Samsung's. I've already seen instances of the media pushing stories about the latest iPhone's "exploding" as well.
On the other hand, this could all be 100% baseless crap, because for-profit media is repugnantly corrupt and almost never researches, or fact checks anything they report. If you look hard enough, you can find a story on virtually anything somewhere in the world. Phone's exploding, teachers having sex with students, whatever is "trending" at the time. It's happening somewhere, and it's probably been happening for decades (if not longer), but it's not happening any more frequently and is otherwise so exceptionally rare that it shouldn't really be considered news at all.