The fact that someone went out of their way to forever commemorate his shitty copper tells me he'd probably be fucking pissed but hey, maybe he was a swindler and a clown.

"People will be still talking about your shitty copper and what an asshole you are in 3,800 years."

"They mad, bro?"

You're absolutely right, if it was actually plating. However, given the contract was for copper ingots, I'd guess the poor quality copper was copper cast into an ingot shape around something worthless rather than what we would consider plating. It could also have been much more about impurities and ores left over from an incomplete smelting/refining process such that trying to hammer or cast the copper resulted in lots of worthless slag.

You could have posted the other one but it's too late for that now! Ha!

Nah, he was just so shitty lately that he had a bunch of them delivered the same day.

Like those restaurants that frame their comically bad reviews.

I've never met the man, and have done little to no business with him, but in my experience if you do a lot of work some people are going to complain about it, and only the pissiest of them would go out of their way to inscribe a tablet about it. Nobody is putting that effort into "went fine, no complaints."

Ea-nāṣir's reputation may be the earliest victim of survivorship bias.