Some additional info the article doesn’t address or skims over:

The accounts were suspended for 3 months.

They only suspended accounts that were overly abusing the system. Players that duped on accident, or a small number of times were not punished except for the removal of some of their in-game currency and maybe a ship or two that they bought with the earnings they made from duping.

This is the first time that Star Citizen players have had a wave of suspensions like this for an exploit.

This is most likely because of how this exploit affected the servers. In Star Citizen, abandoned ships stick around forever on a particular instance, so other players would need to hijack/tow/destroy/salvage them to get rid of them. The players abusing this exploit would duplicate ships with cargo (that could be sold) as fast as they possibly could, leaving more ships behind than what the servers can normally handle well.

This also happened around the time of a free fly event where anyone could try out the game for a bit without having to pay. So the game wasn’t performing as well as it could have been during this event. Although, tbh, this game usually struggles during free flight events anyway.