I think you are correct about the history of Razer products, but this latest line up has been very solid. I had issues with the first laptop I got. It turned out to be a software issue and I got support within a day and they patched the problem within a week. I should also add that they have battery limiting features now and a two year battery warranty. Those two improvements protect you from 90% of the bad experiences people report with these laptops.

Asus I have had consistently bad experiences with and that is why I tried Razer. Of course this is all just my personal experience and I doubt either is perfect.

As far as needing cloud connected software to configure Razer hardware: that is simply false. The laptop is configured via an embedded usb interface that you can send reports to in Linux. There are open source projects that make this particularly easy to do.