My situation was worse than that.

First of all, it wasn't that particular model of smoke alarm, so I'm not sure it had that LED-blinky feature at all. My house has much cheaper models that the contractors installed. It was still a Kidde brand, just a different model line. I don't remember anything in my research about light blink patterns, and I did a lot of research when I encountered the issue initially. (Other than the low-battery indicator blink pattern, which wasn't the case here.)

The worse problem was: According to that quote you cited, the blink pattern only shows during the alarm itself. My alarms would false at 3am for approximately 10 seconds, enough to wake us up and give us heart attacks, then they would stop and everything would be back to normal like nothing happened. So if there was a blink pattern, I would never have seen it.

It took a couple of years for me to realize how to do something about the issue. Since the issue was so rare, and the diagnosis so tricky. Finally digging into the wires and realizing that I could safely remove the interconnect wires from all the harness plugs was the trick.