As a native speaker, I also didn’t really get the headline at first

I’d normally interpret “taking the knife to something” as roughly the same as “making cuts”

But graphene doesn’t make the fairphones and doesn’t support them, so nowhere to really make cuts

I feel like maybe they got the message that people are getting tired of headlines over using terms like “slammed” and wanted to do something different but chose a pretty terrible alternative.

At least we all know what “slammed” means now.