You brought up two really great points that I didn't get into because this was already a fairly lengthy and dense article for Medium.

Part of the Wellbutrin/addiction connection came from many rehab centers in the '90's and '00's only allowing patients to use Wellbutrin as an antidepressant. There had been a few preliminary studies indicating that Wellbutrin actually helped with alcohol and other addictions, although the effect sizes were not large enough to pursue FDA approval. I think this contributed to the notion that people were substituting one addiction for another, although, again, within the addiction treatment community Wellbutrin was considered the safest of the antidepressants to use.

I also have a vivid memory of a psychiatrist lecturing to a group of therapists about the potential for triggering mania with different antidepressants. He presented as fact his own (erroneous) opinion that the most activating antidepressants (like Wellbutrin) were the most likely to trigger mania. This sounds very reasonable, but is completely unsubstantiated by human experience. All of the comparisons that I have seen, as with your recollection, are that Wellbutrin's risk is either comparable to, or lower than, that of the SSRI, and that the tricyclic antidepressants (many of which are consistently sedating) have among the highest risks.