WRT WD 150, it depends on what you consider the Ottley, Latour and Moore variants that were announced late to be. Sure, they were print to order, but aren't they still variants?
Yes they are still variants. But they are not incentive variants or retailer variants.
ES is talking about retailer and incentive variants specifically in his speech and trying to cut way back on them or cut them out completely. I don't really like equal ratio regular price variants either but I guess they don't "pad" the numbers as much as retailer or incentive variants do or sort of encourage smaller shops to order more copies of an issue, that they might not be able to sell or won't sell, just to qualify for a 1 and 50 or 1 and 100 incentive variant.