Not just me then. It was great and then suddenly it became completely unusable. Lineage OS got a few more years out of it. Technically it still works but even Lineage dropped it.
Sadly the Samsung Tab A 10.1 that came later also suffered a huge performance drop (like many seconds to open the keyboard) and there's no supported Lineage for it, so it'll probably just go in a drawer and be forgotten.
Another family member got an iPad mini around the time I got my Nexus, and that's still going.
I don't recommend doing this. I followed those instructions to the letter, and got a completely broken Nexus 7. I somehow managed to recover enough to reinstall the factory image, but it took many many iterations and blind shots in the dark, consuming several hours of my time.
More anecdata: I've done it on two or three devices without issue.
I thought the factory image install scripts rewrote the partition table, so even if you screw it up it should come back as long as you still have fastboot? Or maybe I'm thinking of another model.
Sadly the Samsung Tab A 10.1 that came later also suffered a huge performance drop (like many seconds to open the keyboard) and there's no supported Lineage for it, so it'll probably just go in a drawer and be forgotten.
Another family member got an iPad mini around the time I got my Nexus, and that's still going.