Have you seen anything from iXsystems signalling that they acknowledged the problem and that they are working it?
No. From a UNIX perspective, this isn't really a problem and there's not really anything to work on.
Placing the onus on the end user to ensure a basic sane PATH is setup goes counter to what one would expect from a product toted as an appliance.
That's kind of off-base. UNIX has traditionally expected users to manage their own choice of shell, dotfiles, etc. Linux and more "modern" shells have obliquely acknowledged the problem through mechanisms such as /etc/profile, which work to mitigate deficiencies in an empty homedir+environment, but iX has been somewhat reluctant to make changes to the as-shipped base system that comes from upstream. Such changes typically have unexpected side effects.
The flip side to your comment would be to force a particular environment that is known to work, on the theory that perhaps a user imports dotfiles that are not TrueNAS compatible, perhaps used as NFS homedirs for a UNIX cluster. In such a case, the namespace overlap breaks something somewhere and resolving it involves ugliness of some sort.
In reality the real problem here is the implementation of the alternative admin login. They should just get rid of it. "toor" should have taught us all not to do this a long time ago, but each generation seems to have to learn lessons the hard way.
My conclusion has so far been that these issues are due to them not being finished with the transition from root to user created admin account, but that they are working on it. Are my expectations unreasonable?
Possibly. The user-created admin account concept fits poorly into the system framework and perhaps it isn't the place of an obscure appliance OS to be trying to redesign UNIX security fundamentals that have developed over the last forty years. It isn't "unreasonable" to want it to work, but every time I see a halfarse attempt to re-imagine something like this (look at VyOS for example) it seems to have lots wrong with it in the end.
UNIX based appliances are of significant interest to me, as I designed the first open source FreeBSD appliance platform that eventually morphed into PicoBSD, almost thirty years ago. I might have some significant opinions as a result.
If you want a quick opinion that the original implementation of UNIX "root" was deficient, consider it given. It hasn't gotten better with time, either. For every improvement such as (for ex.) MAC/ntpd, a baby step forward, you have security idiocy such as systemd (huge step backward).
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