I’m a bit dubious about some of this. Ceramic brake shoes? “They’ll be grabby for a while and would work out of it”?
Just wild guessing here, but my feeling is that the brake shoes (1 or both sides) could have been seriously out of adjustment or something was incorrectly done in one of the brake assemblies. After the re-do maybe they simply corrected the problem and are feeding you some fast talk rather than admit to a foul-up.
Just a possibility anyhow.