You can kinda make that sound bad, and it might have been bad, but reworking pieces is standard practice in many industries. "Fixed with adhesive" sounds like a hack but there are many wonderful adhesives.
You're right but without more information we shouldn't really take what's printed in the newspaper at face value. Was it really a punctured _cell_ as you and I understand it, or was it a punctured _assembly_? A battery pack has a lot of sheet metal and supporting materials etc.
>punctured through the plastic housing (called a clamshell) and into some battery cells
Emphasis mine. I interpreted that as also popping some of the individual cells. If you replaced the individual cells that were breached you could probably be okay, but at the same time, look at how minor the defect was that was causing Samsung phones to catch fire