Where did you get this?
Last time I checked on my cams, all cams continue to record to the SD card if the internet goes out.
(ex: Your camera was online just fine and then suddenly the internet goes out, but the camera had already previously authenticated, so it keeps recording even though there is no internet anymore).
People purposely do this all the time for things like a warehouse or cabin or something. They will connect the cam to a hotspot on their phone, turn it on to record all events, once it is running they’ll turn off their hotspot and leave. When they return they will turn the hotspot back on and review the recorded events on the SD card just fine as long as the power never went out.
I definitely agree that some of the older model cams are a better fit for some people’s use-cases. I have been running some of these new cams without Cam Plus on them and it hasn’t been too bad for me depending on what I want to use them for. I still get notifications and I can still view events, so I haven’t really missed cloud recordings. The 5-minute cooldown is no different from older models though, so while I would prefer no cooldown, I can’t say it’s a huge difference.
The main way I see the new cams as having a big flaw is when wanting to share the camera with someone like a spouse or other family member. If you don’t have cam plus, the other person will never be able to review events. That is a big negative for sharing. I brought this up in the recent AMA and one of the cofounders responded. Here’s my question and the answer:
Now that so many of the newer cams don’t support Cam Plus Lite and won’t have Cloud events without Cam Plus on them, that makes sharing the newer cams with a spouse or others barely usable because they can’t view the SD card playback on a shared cam and now there won’t be cloud events for the shared user to view, meaning they can only view the livestream but no events, ever. Will Wyze thus be making it a priority this year to fix being able to start sharing the SD card playback with shared accounts?
That’s what I see as the biggest issue with the new cams. If a person needs to share the camera and won’t have Cam Plus, then they should stick with a V3 instead. Same if they need free person detection, stick with a V3. If you’re not going to share, and person detection isn’t critical, or if you have cam plus unlimited already, then these newer cams are pretty awesome. So which version I recommend to people totally depends on what a person’s use case is.
I have never liked the 5-minute cooldown though, and I think it could be reduced now that they are only using a thumbnail instead of a full video upload. I hope they will eventually reconsider reducing that. I know the VP said he’s pushing for Wyze to move away from Cloud dependency and make things run more locally and have cloud as an option for extra features. This seems like a step in that direction (thumbnail notifications with all events stored on the SD card). Hopefully they further move in that direction, especially as the Matter standards are decided and Wyze works toward that. Hopefully Matter does something like require no cooldowns (or very limited). 
Maybe someone can put in that suggestion to the people considering it. I would back that up.