Interesting writeup!

Today I learned about TCXO.

If anyone else are curious, that component cost about $2 per piece.

Can't comment on the wire bonding quality but yes you're not supposed to sonic wash anything with an oscillator. This includes ultra and mega sonic. I had always thought it was because you could damage the crystal or mems structures, so color me surprised to see this failure mode, though there still could be a shift in frequency that the scoping wasn't able to see.

I tried looking at an exemplar ECS tcxo datasheet and didn't see anything in there about washing which is surprising but it also doesn't say not to crush it with a hammer so maybe it was assumed. That's bad on them.

As for SMA to 0.1" headers: yes these are very cursed. But RF designers love putting SMAs for every connector on an eval board (power, enable, whatever) and those come in handy.

I've always been cautioned against ultrasonic cleaning of boards that have crystal oscillators, and indeed it's in most XO datasheets.

I've also heard that one shouldn't trim the leads of a through-hole XO before soldering it into the board, since the mechanical shock of the lead breaking can ring the whole package and similarly shake it apart. I'm curious if anyone here has seen that in practice!

That's a very cute domain name. Thank you whoever wrote this up and posted it, I'm in the process of building something that has a crystal on it and I did not realize this was a risk.