Not after sympathy here, just pointing out that thieves don’t always follow the logic that you might expect.
That particular bike was actually locked up regularly in the same place for over a year before someone decided that some odd, distinctive wheels which fit about 1% of the bikes in the UK were just what he needed to fund his crack habit.
In terms of what people “should” be doing to secure their bikes, the answer, in an ideal world, is “nothing” – people shouldn’t take stuff that doesn’t belong to them.
It’s a sad state of affairs if people take much better precautions than the average punter (how many bikes do you see secured by nothing more than a crappy cable lock?) and yet are somehow still “responsible” for their bike getting nicked or stripped.