The Z3 was not a general purpose computer; it was a calculator that performed a predetermined sequence of operations that was written to its tape. It was remarkable for being all-binary in an era when differential gears and cams were very common in computing devices, and had some other advanced features. But the 1990s article that declared it Turing-complete is just silly. It would apply to every four-function calculator that supports rounding, and programming a computer like that is not just "impractical" - both the tape and execution time would grow exponentially in number of branches - but it is not the model that Turing proposed. The whole point of Turing's (theoretical) device is that a short program using the abilities of that device could perform unlimited computations; if you make the program length unlimited instead, that's a much less interesting model of computation.

The problem is that anything that gets into Wikipedia becomes ingrained in the Internet's collective mind, which then can't be changed.

Would it not have been easy to add branch instructions to it? Just rewind the instruction tape however many places. It seems 99% of the job was done.