Hi,

The thing is that in your case, you have a ReLU between the Linear and Batchnorm. So that statement may not be true for your model.
I think that statement comes from the fact that the batchnorm will center the values. So a bias is useless in the previous layer as it will just be cancelled by the batchnorm.
model2 has much less parameters. So it will perform differently. It will depend on your dataset though which one is better.