I don't see anything in that prior article claiming AMD promised the feature would be available on older motherboards. Even the title of the article itself uses the term "may", and that officially "AMD says you will lose support for PCIe 4.0 on its older platforms." It sounds like AMD's stance all along was that PCIe 4.0 would be a feature of the new boards, and that it was just some motherboard vendors suggesting PCIe 4.0 could work on their older boards. "Our sources tell us that AMD can simply lock out that feature and that the fate of PCIe 4.0 support on 300- and 400-series motherboards haven't been communicated to them yet."
And sure, in the update section, when contacted AMD apparently clarified that they "will not lock the out feature, instead it will be up to motherboard vendors to validate and qualify the faster standard on its motherboards on a case-by-case basis." That certainly doesn't sound like there was any promised support for the feature, just that some boards might potentially be able to support it. Probably very few if any of these boards ended up meeting the standards for official PCIe 4.0 support.
In any case, I don't think many people will even care about this. Especially since, according to that article, it only worked on the first x16 slot, and not even the M.2 slots. That first slot will typically be fitted with a graphics card, and today's cards are not even anywhere close to needing more bandwidth than what PCIe 3.0 x16 can provide. Most of today's cards will offer practically full performance on even a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, so the benefits of PCIe 4.0 for graphics cards are likely many years off. The only hardware I can immediately think of that people might want PCIe 4.0 for would be for fast NVME SSDs, but the M.2 slots of these older boards were not expected to support 4.0 anyway.
And even on the new X570 boards, I can't say I'm convinced PCIe 4.0 is a killer feature. It may be desirable for those who want to get every last ounce out of their storage performance with the latest high-end SSDs, and maybe for certain other specialized expansion hardware, but probably not all that useful for most people. The real-world performance benefits of current NVMe drives tend to be minimal over even SATA drives that offer a fraction of the maximum transfer speeds. Even if PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives offer double the theoretical performance, I doubt that will translate to any significant performance gains in the vast majority of common storage tasks.
That doesn't bode well for A-series motherboard pricing with the new motherboards.
That is assuming the A520 boards are even designed to support PCIe 4.0. As far as I know, AMD has only specified that X570 will feature full 4.0 support. The A-series boards are the extreme budget models that don't even support overclocking, so it's very possible that they could stick with 3.0. And that's fine, since budget shoppers are probably not going to be too concerned about not getting maximum performance out of high-end storage hardware. Even on B550, I wouldn't be surprised at all if PCIe 4.0 is only supported on the slots connected to the CPU. Perhaps the first x16 slot and the first M.2 slot would be my guess, while any additional slots controlled by the chipset would likely use 3.0. I can't see mid-range boards requiring a large heat sink with an active cooler on the motherboard chipset like we see with X570 boards.
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